Upcoming moOde 8.3.0 release (Q1 2023)

[Tim Curtis]

@Tim Curtis 

I think you and I are looking through the telescope from opposite ends  

From my perspective, it's not that the Imager dev chose to support /home/pi but that by default in Linux new user accounts are assigned uid:gid in numeric order beginning at 1000:1000. Thus I have trouble with wording like "aliasing". There is no user pi (see /etc/passwd) to alias to.

Regards,
Kent

Right but our release image contains /home/pi with piano.sh, .dircolors and .xinitrc files. These are preserved if something other than pi is chosen as the userid in the Pi Imager which suggests that it's intelligently renaming /home/pi to /home/USERID instead of just creating an empty /home/USERID and leaving /home/pi as-is.

Ah, gotcha. Smarter than the average bear {for those of you who endured Saturday morning TV cartoons for the sake of your kids].

Meanwhile, there turns out to be an easy fix.

Quoting from man systemd.exec

User=, Group=
           Set the UNIX user or group that the processes are executed as, respectively. Takes a single user or group
           name, or a numeric ID as argument.

So, change the appropriate line in the localui.service unit file to read

Code:

# was User=pi
User=1000

and Bob's your uncle! The localui now starts in my test system.

Regards,
Kent

Coolness. I'll add this to the TODO item "Eliminate hard coded /home/pi references" :-)