When building an install4j installer, How does one add and/or remove data from the users home directory when dpkg requires sudo

Question

I'm building a .deb installer using install4j and I tried adding a Desktop icon to the user's desktop, but it doesn't work because dpkg requires sudo so it tries to copy the icon to /root/Desktop which is incorrect and doesn't exist.

We also have some application data that we want to purge on uninstall and I believe it is similarly not being deleted because it is running as sudo.

I do not have elevation set for unix, I believe this is a requirement of dpkg.

Answer 1

The user home directory of the original user is not available. The files in the user home directory should be created by the application itself, see

Debian packaging: deploying files to the user home directory