Dear community,
I am using Arduino IDE 2.0 with Arduino Zero in Windows 10 in a multi-user, multiple desktop environment in a university. We have decided to use it because it its debug capabilities.
It is running fine on my personal pc, where I got admin rights. It also works on a lab pc, when I got admin rights. If I log on as a user without admin right, I run into several problems:
- I would like to use a fixed path for all the sketchbooks, but if I log on as a different user, the default path to the sketchbooks switches back to a location in the user area. Whilst that is ok for the sketchbooks itself, it turns out it is an issue for the libraries. If I would use the installation like that, every user would have to download all the required libraries, boards and necessary tools in their own user drive. Which they cannot, because they are not admins.
- If I solved the default sketchbook location, I would solve the library location as well. But I do have a very similar problem with the boards and the related tools. I know the live by default in C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages
But I would like to have one place where all the users can access the files, avoiding duplicated files and potential rights clashes.
Every user is part of a domain, but I do not have any control over the domain settings. That means very user has their own profile, which is a copy of the default profile on the local machine. Therefore, I could change the default on every single machine, but that is quite time consuming. Ideally I would just provide the Arduino IDE one fixed path for the libraries, and one for the boards independently of the sketchbooks location. I know most engineers need to have admin rights on their machines, but here the situation is different, mainly for legal reasons. There are also some commercial tools with similar issues, so I am not blaming anybody, just looking for a convenient solution.
Thanks,
Tom