• As this is the Linux superuser account, you are strongly encouraged to make backups.
• Firmware updates and factory reset will change your SSH password. Writing down your password is recommended, but not enough! It is strongly recommended that you set up a passwordless login with SSH keys.
• If your operating system is using OpenSSH 8.8 or later, you will need to manually enable ssh-rsa keys.

This guide will teach you how to log into your reMarkable from your computer. There is a separate article on how to transfer files.

Connect your reMarkable to Wi-Fi or via USB (or both), and you will find your SSH password and IP address (or addresses) in the settings menu.

• Settings > Help > Copyrights and licenses > General information (scroll down)

On Windows, you have to first enable the official OpenSSH client. Then open a command line prompt (Windows Key + R, type 'cmd', press Enter).

On MacOS and Linux, you already have an SSH client, so just open Terminal.

If you connected your reMarkable via USB, enter the following command:

ssh root@10.11.99.1

If you connected your reMarkable via Wi-Fi, the IP will be assigned by your router and can vary greatly depending on your network configuration. Usually it takes the form below. Replace x with the appropriate number.

ssh root@192.168.0.x

Depending on your network configuration, your reMarkable may also be available via hostname like remarkable, remarkable.local or remarkable.lan.

ssh root@remarkable

Then enter your reMarkable password. The password will not be shown as you type it.

You can set up an alias that is easier to remember by adding the following lines to the ~/.ssh/config file on your computer:

host rem
    Hostname 10.11.99.1
    User root
    Port 22
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

The file above will allow you to login by entering ssh rem (instead of ssh root@10.11.99.1) and transfer files with scp <source> rem:<destination>. You can replace the word “rem” with an alias of your choice.

The reMarkable uses dropbear (via BusyBox) for its SSH server and supports ssh-rsa keys. Keys save you from having to enter the randomly generated password repeatedly.

If you have previously generated ssh keys on your machine for other connections, please be very careful before following these instructions, and ask for advice if needed. You might end up deleting a key that you did not want to lose.

On your computer, generate a public and private SSH key pair with

ssh-keygen

You can leave the location blank to use the default and leave the passphrase blank.

Most Linux/Unix machines come with a helper script called ssh-copy-id that will automatically copy your ssh keys across and install them on the remote machine.

To send the public key id_rsa.pub from your computer to the reMarkable use

ssh-copy-id root@10.11.99.1

Unfortunately, current distributed versions of this command (as of roughly 2022 - e.g. Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04) have a fault that ends up putting the keys in the wrong location - they will go to /etc/dropbear/authorized_keys instead of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. If this happens you won't get any error messages, the command will look like it worked correctly, but you will still be prompted for a password when you try to connect. See https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/pull/250 for details; this fault was corrected in `ssh-copy-id` on 2023-05-23, and will be included in OpenSSH-Portable 9.4. Hopefully this means that Debian 12 and Ubuntu 24.04 will be OK, this will need to be confirmed when they are released.

To fix the problem, you can move the key file from its wrong location to the correct one:

mv /etc/dropbear/authorized_keys ~/.ssh

Use the Without ssh-copy-id instructions below if you have issues :-

On your reMarkable, create an .ssh directory

mkdir -m 700 ~/.ssh

Exit the SSH session and send the host key from your computer to the reMarkable. This will create a new file on your reMarkable named `authorized_keys`, which will contain your public key.

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@10.11.99.1:~/.ssh/authorized_keys

On your reMarkable again, set the permissions of authorized_keys to owner read and write, otherwise it will not be used.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Starting with OpenSSH 8.8 ssh-rsa keys are disabled by default, so you will get the following error when trying to log into your reMarkable.

Unable to negotiate with 10.11.99.1 port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa

You can check your OpenSSH version with ssh -V

Some Linux distros like Fedora 33 have also disabled weaker ssh-rsa keys independently of OpenSSH. That means you could face the same issue on OpenSSH versions lower than 8.8, depending on the distro you are on.

To allow ssh-rsa keys, add the following lines to your SSH Config file.

  PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa
  HostKeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa