Crond & root access

ikkans

Hi there,

First of all let me thank you for a great product you guys are developing!
I'm currently evaluating Emteria.OS on RPi4 for digital signage and I'm surprised how well it works. Again, great job!

I have couple of questions though. Our android digital signage app works quite well on Emteria.OS - but to unlock all functionalities it needs root access. I'm aware of sushell app you created but I couldn't find any examples on how to use it from inside of another application. Also, is there a way to grant certain application permanent root access?

Another feature that we are missing before we can use Emteria in production is crond. We are usually using https://f-droid.org/en/packages/it.faerb.crond/ for scheduled tasks - however, just like our own app, it requires root access in order to work. Is there a way to run it with root permissions or can you recommend task scheduler that works with Emteria.OS.

Thank you,
Ivan

ikkans

Hey guys,

Is there any info about the above questions?

smieschek

@ikkans Thanks for your nice words, we really appreciate it!

We generally discourage our customers to give general root access to an app as in most cases there are better, more secure ways. Can you elaborate what the functionalities are that your app needs root access?

In any case, we have a simple serial sample app: https://github.com/emteria/samples_apps_Serial
As it was written for RPi3 we use su, but for RPi4 you would exchange it with sushell.
Once your app tries to access root permissions there will be a prompt where you can select to give it permanently. See "Remember choice forever" in https://emteria.com/kb/root-access-sushell

For the crond you would probably need to adjust it to use sushell or create a symbolic link from su to sushell. I'm not that familiar with crond, maybe setting it's permissions might suffice. What tasks are you trying to run periodically?