Unable to reuse existing /home partition when uid is not the default one (1000)

[hublol]

Which ISO version are you using?

2024-07-01

The installation log

install.log

Installing packages: ['pipewire', 'pipewire-alsa', 'pipewire-jack', 'pipewire-pulse', 'gst-plugin-pipewire', 'libpulse', 'wireplumber']
['/usr/bin/arch-chroot', '/mnt/archinstall', 'su', '-', 'halol', '-c', 'systemctl enable --user pipewire-pulse.service'] exited with abnormal exit code [1]: su: warning: cannot change directory to /home/halol: Permission denied
-bash: /home/halol/.bash_profile: Permission denied
[0;1;31mFailed to enable unit /home/halol/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants/pipewire-pulse.service: Permission denied[0m

[0;1;31mFailed to enable unit /home/halol/.config/systemd/user/sockets.target.wants/pipewire-pulse.socket: Permission denied[0m

describe the problem

archinstall version 2.8.1

I am running into an error when trying to re-use an existing /home partition without wiping it.

The problem comes from the fact that the user that must be created, and that is the current owner of the files in /home, doesn't have the default uid 1000.

Since the uid cannot be specified, archinstall recreate the user with the default uid. This then cause archinstall to fail when setting up pipewire (see log file):

So, it would be handy to be able to specify the uid of the users that are created (can be provided in the user_credentials.json), both because it would be a nice to have feature, and because it would help to avoid this problem.

By the way, re-using an existing /home partition is not something well documented. It would also be very nice to have a small example of how to do this in the documentation (I am not completely confident that I am doing this right).

Thanks a lot!