DBUS User other than "messagebus"

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 at 09:24:38 -0400, Sathia Narayanan wrote:
>  Is there any known issues in launching the DBUS deamon using any other user
> that is already existing instead of separate user called "messagebus"?
>  Will it impact launching both session bus and system bus?

The session bus must run as the user who owns that session.

The system bus expects to be run as the user specified at build time,
defaulting to messagebus. You can change it by configuring dbus with the
--with-dbus-user option:

    ./configure --with-dbus-user=thesystembus

For instance, here's my Debian system running one GUI session, demonstrating
that the session bus runs as me and the system bus runs as messagebus:

    smcv at reptile% whoami
    smcv
    smcv at reptile% pgrep dbus-daemon |xargs ps -o user,command
    USER     COMMAND
    103      /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system
    smcv     /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 [...] --session
    smcv at reptile% getent passwd messagebus
    messagebus:x:103:104::/var/run/dbus:/bin/false

Regards,
    Simon