Dear maintainer,

I installed the kodi package on a fresh installed debian testing and enabled the kodi systemd-service which should start kodi in standalone mode.
The service file (/lib/systemd/system/kodi.service) is configured to run as 'kodi' user, but this user doesn't exist after installation.
I think automatically adding the user when using him would make sense.
After adding the user everything works as expected.

Thanks for your work and have a nice day,
Moritz Schmidt

Hi Moritz,

2017-03-09 21:55 GMT+01:00 Moritz Schmidt <moritz+debian@mmnx.de>:

It would make sense if every installation used the kodi user, but
there are many people who start kodi from their normal session or set
up automatic logging in in the display manager to start kodi [1].

I was thinking about adding a debconf question about adding the kodi
user and enabling  the standalone mode during package configuration
but this is about the same amount of added complexity as the current
manual addition of the kodi user.

I think if someone sets up a system for kodi only the first added user
is usually the user which runs kodi anyway.

AFAIK the kodi-systemd-service way is preferred on constrained systems
where running even lightdm would waste too much memory,
but I have just found nodm [2] which could also help here.

Great!

I will consider adding the debconf question and creating the kodi
user, but not by default.

Thanks!

Cheers,
Balint

[1] http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Autostart_Kodi_for_Linux
[2] https://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nodm.html

Hi Balint,

thanks for your reply!

Yeah, a debconf question would be wonderful! I think that many prefer to
just hit yes instead of setting it up on your own with all the hassle,
but maybe I'm just lazy.

If you don't have to - why would you want to use a DM? The
kodi-systemd-service starts kodi via xinit so why would you need that on
a standalone-system?


Thanks again for your time and effort,
Moritz

As a hint to other people who could read this:

+1
Also, having the unit installed is kind of misleading, as if it was
saying "hey, I'm ready!". Leaving it in the example directory would be
better probably, alongside with a quick notice in the readme with
example adduser command and a reminder to not forget the audio group
(spent stupidly 30 minutes on this right before…).
Also I needed to go back to root-Xorg in my case (Xwrapper.config).

Yeah seems much simpler without. I use it on a server, so no need to
stack more stuff.

Now it works nicely for me, thanks for the packaging :)