Posts by keshlam

  • Potential user question: Is LibreELEC really stuck running as a root-only system?

    Sigh. Understood. Your concerns are different from mine. I have industrial-strength firewalls in place at the network level; I'm not significantly worried about people trying to break into the box.

    But I'm looking to bring up a general-purpose machine where Kodi is its public face but where internally it's a full NAS and home automation center. And sometimes I'm going to want other apps on the large screen (teleconferencing, for example), and I'd rather not have to tie up _another_ computer (and HDMI input) to run those.

    I certainly like LibreElec's responsiveness; the only other distro I've found for this machine which boots and responds as snappily is the Armbian build, and for that you get into a certain amount of "who has responsibility for display issues" wrangling. (Armbian doesn't seem to have full edid/xrandr resolution negotiation, and is giving up and picking VGA (!) resolution for my 4K Samsung TV; I don't have a fix for that yet.)

    So starting from LibreElec looked like a possibly promising route. But it sounds like I'm so far out of your target user space that it isn't worth pursuing. Not your fault.

    Alternative suggestions welcome, if you happen to have any, but it sounds like I should just get out of the way and let you work. You're designing a media-only appliance; I want a more general NAS/server with media capabilities. Different strokes. Best wishes for success in your targeted niche.

  • Potential user question: Is LibreELEC really stuck running as a root-only system?

    I'm trying to bring up a Libre Renegade RK3328-CC SBC as a basic media server and NAS box. LibreElec would seem an obvious starting point... except that Libre's image is built on the "run everything as root:root" model.

    I'm sorry, but I'm a firm believer that most activities should be scoped to a specific user, to ensure that careless errors like rm -rf (or coding errors with similar unintended consequences) can only cause limited damage. Even if the user is configured for passwordless sudo, having the requirement that sudo be explicitly invoked is a major safety improvement. This isn't DOS, or Win3.1, or even OS/2; we have good access controls built into Linux and we really should be using them. NAS, KODI, and other services should be _unable_ to accidentally step on each other or on the operating system.

    1. Is there a compelling reason for making this a single-user system, or was it just "most folks who have only run Windows barely understand the difference between normal and admin roles, never mind multiple users; let's keep it simple for them."
    2. How much mess would be caused by reconfiguring LibreElec to add users, and preferably to run Kodi as a non-root user?
    3. Has anyone already done so, and if so have they shared their experience/checklist -- or, better, a non-root image we could start with?
    4. UNRELATED: Does anyone have advice for wrestling with displays that aren't already recognized? My goal is to use this to feed a Samsung 4K TV, and some of the other images I tried gave up and fell back to what looks like 640x480 resolution. I'm willing to tolerate HDTV resolution and trust the TV to upscale if I must, but it'd be nice to be able to take full advantage of this screen.

    Thanks in advance!