/home/oem and /home/oem/Desktop is owned by root after oem installation, causing the OEM configuration environment to be (nearly) unusable

[Aaron Rainbolt]

Steps to reproduce:

1: Boot an ISO of Kubuntu 24.04 Release Candidate.
2: Select "OEM mode (for manufacturers)" at bootup.
3: Proceed through the installation.
4: Boot into the OEM user.

Expected result: The system should boot normally.

Actual result: Plasma will fail to start.

Reason: I foolishly instructed a fellow Ubuntu Developer to add code to calamares-settings-ubuntu that drops a desktop file into /home/oem/Desktop that allows exiting OEM configuration mode easily (similar to how oem-config works). I failed to take into account that having the code drop this file into place when the code runs as root would mean that /home/oem/Desktop (and also /home/oem) would end up owned by root. Because they are owned by root, Plasma and Unity are unable to start. LXQt starts, but won't function as expected.

This requires only one line of code to fix per release - a simple `chown -R oem:oem /home/oem` is needed after extracting the OEM mode tarball into the root filesystem of the installed system. This is a very safe change to make because it's confined only to OEM mode (the code never runs outside of an OEM installation context), and, well, OEM mode is already hopelessly broken, we can't break it much more :P

[Aaron Rainbolt (arraybolt3)]

This affects all of Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Unity. However, since the fix only affects OEM mode, we will not have to entirely retest all three after respinning.

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

Using 1:24.04.39 from the UNAPPROVED queue, I was able to confirm that the issue is fixed.

Before applying the fix, first boot of an OEM install would be entirely non-functional. Now, it boots up to a user session (or the login manager) as expected.

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/2063403

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package calamares-settings-ubuntu - 1:24.04.39

---------------
calamares-settings-ubuntu (1:24.04.39) noble; urgency=medium

  * Fix permissions on /home/oem when doing OEM installations. (LP: #2063403)

 -- Aaron Rainbolt <email address hidden> Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:01:37 -0500