Greetings; The arm folks, like unbuntu and raspian, are distribution for installation usually on an micro-sd card, install images with the first user pre-configured. He is in the sudoers file, but the ability to install other software to actually DO something is restricted to a root pw only, and that is unknown/unpublished.
I just spent 2 days (and I still have one more item to fix, probably no biggie, but it won't let ME run raspi.config, has a hissy because it can't even find pi's home directory) with the sd card mounted intermittently in a reader, removing the user pi from the debian-jessie-full image, making it so that I was user 1000 and COULD install what I needed onto an raspberry pi 3b. That SW was linuxcnc, last nights bleeding edge version, supplied in a deb from the buildbot.linuxcnc.org. I expected the raspi to have problems with that SW because of its heavy, and time critical IRQ response requirements. But not a single instance of an out of range delay was recorded while it ran a virtual lathe to make half a dozen chess pawns on that lathe. So we have a new, in-expensive machine controller lashup. This existing situation is very discouraging to potential new users who expect to be able to do these things from his own account. And finds out quickly that there are many things that even user 1000 still cannot do on the raspi, or an odroid64-c2, an even more powerfull SBC thats still stuck in kernel 3.14 days. And that kernel, while running on it, has NO support for its 4 gpu's, nor working support for spi, which would appear to be the future interface to a machine controller of choice as it gives 72 gpio lines, quite some number of which can become useful functions like a PWM generator to control things that need an analog voltage control, or a stepper motor pulse generator, even a quadrature encoder receiver capable of tracking spindle position to a 1.5 degree accuracy at 12,000 rpms in the encoder I've built. All that in an fpga card that sells for $53 and can be field re-programmed with one of many supplied fpga bit files. Thats the bragging. But the pre-allocation of user 1000 in the distributed image, instead of that being part of the normal first login procedure is a PAIN IN THE A$$ to fix so that the first user can actually install what he needs to get his job done while logging in as himself, using his normal pw. Please exert what ever influence you may have to make the first user a first login function again for the arm distributions that port your source. Thank you Debian for a great, stable (I'm still on wheezy with this old, slow, Phenom powered machine) os. Its a place of familiarity that Just Works(TM) if one doesn't want to be a lab rat. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
