Raspberry Pi Imager for Standard User

Question

I am helping design a lab at school where the students of the class will image their own Raspberry Pis. Right now there are only 20 students in the pilot class, but I will soon need to scale this to ~120 students across several sections.

The computer lab they have access to is full of Ubuntu machines where they are all Standard (sudo-less) users.

Is anyone aware of a configuration where you could rpi-imager without sudo access? Specifically, this seems to be an issue with access to writing to the SD card.

Answer 1

AFAIK normally only sudoers can access hardware.

It is possible to give sudo access to a particular program (e.g. imager) for all users which should make this possible.

This can be done by editing the /etc/sudoers file (which needs to be done with some care).
Probably the easiest would be to give suid permission to the imager.

I have never used Imager on Linux, but on my Mac all users have execute permissions. I suggest you check permission on Ubuntu.