Software Deployment

Hi Oreillyr,

I'd agree that generally, snapshotting MSI based installations is a bad idea, especially in your case. While it may work, what if Adobe release an MSP for one of their products? You will have to repackage all of them just to capture the changes in the MSP for one product. If you are talking about a whole suite then you can see it might get tricky.

Does the setup.exe have a silent installation method? Fingers crossed that it does, and you can just run that, give it the serial number and it will silently install all the MSI's in question. That may not be applicable to what you want to do though. If its not then I would see if you can do a log of the manual installation from the setup.exe - the logs should tell you what serial number is being passed to the MSI's and from there you should be able to include it as a property in a transform for each MSI.

Hope thats made some sort of sense :)

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply. There is a silent install option provided by Adobe which is done through an XML file. However this XML file(see below) does not appear to allow you to add transforms to the install for customisation. I am going to try and edit the base MSI's with the relevant properties and shortcut folders and pray!

I have tried a silent install on the exe using <PathToExe>setup.exe /S /V but it throws up errors

" .\AutoPlay\Main.ini "
"MAIN_FILE_VERSION"
"PRODUCT_REGISTRY_PARENT"
"PRODUCT_REGISTRY_KEY"

and then exits. At present I cannot get a log from the install. Do you have any suggestions as to how I might get one? I have tried the command line /l*v but this does not work. Cheers

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<AdobeInstallerConfiguration version="1.0">

<InstallerInfo platform="win" silentMode="1" targetVolume="C:\" targetPath="Program Files\Adobe\" />

<InstallerInfo platform="mac" targetVolume="/" />

<ProductInfo serial="0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000" licensedUserName="Adobe User" licensedUserCompany="Adobe Systems, Inc." />

<Manifest>

<Product name="Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe ImageReady CS2" selected="1" />

<Product name="Adobe Illustrator CS2" selected="1" />

<Product name="Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional" selected="1" />

<Product name="Adobe GoLive CS2" selected="1" />

<Product name="Adobe Version Cue CS2" selected="1" />

<Product name="Adobe InDesign CS2" selected="1" />

</Manifest>

</AdobeInstallerConfiguration>
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I can't figure out how to apply transforms either!

as for log files, the creative suite installer sticks log files in the %temp% directory for each msi and there's a SuiteInstaller2.0.txt that shows you the overall progress.

While you can edit the base msi's, you still need to use the Suite Installer due to some fancy activation/licensing stuff it does outside of the msi's.

It's been a painful road!