Wininstall LE issue

[stevehp]

I have a minor niggle with Wininstall LE.

 

The before discovery works without a hitch, the application install works great, but the after discovery portion takes ages upon ages to complete.

 

I started this morning around 9:30AM with iTunes as my application I'm modifying, and currently it's 1:02PM here and it's sitting at the converting NAI to MSI screen. It's been sitting there for going on two hours now. No disk activity on the client at all, and very little network congestion at this time. Am I missing something?

 

Anybody have any ideas on how to speed this process up?

[Ambient]

I've had this issue with some flash based maths software before (where it stuck on the same "converting NAI to MSI screen forever and a day). Wininstall obviously didnt like the software...and thats what seems to be the case with what you're trying to do.

 

Im sure the answer to this question will be "yes", but is the machine you're making the Msi on totally clean (apart from the app you're trying to package of course)

 

To this day, i've never managed to get my maths software packaged....but the 50 or so other Msi's which i've made using Wininstall have all worked fine.

 

Not much help...but atleast you arent on your own.

[stevehp]

After some troubleshooting it appears Wininstall LE doesn't care for the GEAR Aspi drivers that iTunes installs for whatever purpose (DRM I'm guessing). I gave up on that after discovering that little tidbit.

 

I'm trying out Repackager from Appdeploy.com . I've been much more succesful with it, but I'm still trying to make an installer that actually works.

 

A dozen or more staff in my district acquired Ipod Touches for use with iTunesU and the App Store. So with that in mind I'm trying to find a workable solution to automatically move the content/library folder iTunes uses into a local folder versus it going to there My Documents/My Music folder which in turn will end up on our file servers. I can do it easy peesy with new machines that I image by way of the Default User profile. What's stopping me in my tracks are the older machines machines we have currently deployed that do not have iTunes installed.

 

What I'm needing to do is have my Preferences set i.e. Parental Controls, sharing turned off, etc.. then I need delete the iTunes folder in the My Music folder, then create a folder in C: called iTunes Data for instance and then tell iTunes to use that folder(hold down shift then double click the shortcut).

 

If anyone has any thoughts on how I could achieve this easily I would greatly appreciate it.

Edited January 20, 2010 by stevehp

[jsnetman]

I don't think you should have a niggle with winstallle rather the bloated software from apple. If the Itunes installer extracts and runs MSI's to install the software I think winstallle will have problems as winstallle cannot repackage MSI's. Try running the Itunes installer with a /a or /? to see if you get any extraction switches. Then if you can extract the MSI's use Orca or another type tool to modify the MSI's. Sometimes you don't get any extraction options and they automatically extract to the windows temp folder or even in the user profile temp folder. Edited January 20, 2010 by jsnetman

[stevehp]

I'll give that a shot. I'm not too familiar with Orca though.

[garethEds]

I'm sure iTunes extracts a .msi file into the %temp% folder as it installs.

 

Open your %temp% folder from the start menu and watch is refresh as iTunes installs.

 

GJE

[stevehp]

I extracted it with 7-zip. It worked a treat. I have seven different msi installers and an executable file. I took a gander at the itunes msi installer and quite frankly have no idea where to start or if I can achieve what I need to do with just an msi editor. I can edit it to install via GPO just fine, but locking it down and moving the library folder off the My Docs folder I don't think I'll get quite that far I'm afraid.

 

I have staff in four different buildings so it's not like I can install it with everything at the defaults then visit each machine to modify those settings logged in as that user. That would take weeks and I don't have that kind of free time unfortunately.

[SYNACK]

What you could do once you have figured out the appropriate number of goats to slaughter to make iTunes behave and install is this.

 

When it is freshly installed take a before snapshot with winstall then make the configuration changes and take an after snapshot. With some luck you should have the distilled result of the changes that you can check through in winstall to see either the easiest way to automate it or as a last resort have a second MSI to deploy after iTunes to make the changes. This may need to be deployed per user to make it work.

 

This method relies on the configuration being stored somewhere sane though so its about 50/50 odds. Worth a shot though.

[stevehp]

That's a good idea. Never thought of that. I'll try that out.

[stevehp]

Success and failure.

 

Thanks to SYNACK and the suggestion of making an MSI of the changes. That whole mess is sorted well sorta I still have to cobble together a script to clean up some folders as well as installing six different msi installers. Anyways that's that.

 

The failure part of this is yet another reason why I despise Apple's dimwitted, half hearted attempts at making software for the Windows PC platform. Sure it works for joe user sitting at home, but for someone such as myself who wants to use it in a school enviroment, well that's another story.

 

The issue is that when I make my images I make an account called "user" I install and configure everything I need then do the copy profile trick and copy the "user" account into the "Default User" account. When I did all my changes I placed the iTunes library in D:\Documents and Settings\User\iTunes Data\ that way each user has his or her own library and content folder. Well I come to find out after adding the pc to the domain and logging in as a user the library/content folder did not change in the preferences from the path above to whatever user I'm logged in as. So instead of it using an enviroment variable such as %UserProfile% it's using a hard coded path. I should have expected this from the very beginning.

 

So I dig and find two different XML files. One is located in the library folder itself and changing the path in that file did no use. Then there is another one (Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPref.xml)that I believe will work for me, but the issue is the xml file is encoded so the folder locations aren't in a plain old ASCII text it's in some unicode language and I'm not the least bit clued in on how to read it.

 

So I'm stuck yet again. I'm doing google search after google search and have not found anything of real use yet.

Edited January 22, 2010 by stevehp

[stevehp]

Well Friday afternoon I figured out the itunespref.xml file had base64 encoded text. After taking the time to encode my directory which included an enviroment variable, iTunes spit it out and said it couldn't find a library so it wanted to create a new one.

 

So I'm back at square one in regards to this. I'm going to give up and just make a single library directory. The majority of these machines I'll be deploying it to are teacher workstations so only one user account might be used on it all year.

 

If I where a mad scripting genius or knew someone of that caliber I could make it work. What I would need is a script that would do the following:

 

1. Ascertain the AD user account that is logging into the machine.

2. Determine if the user has logged into this machine before i.e. check for a local cached profile with say a text file in it stating they've logged in here before so don't run the script.

3. The user account name would be pasted into a base64 encoder and the encoded text would be spat out and pasted into the necessary locations in the itunespref.xml file.

4. The itunespref.xml would be placed in the App Data folder in that local cached profile.

 

That's a theoritical idea in my mind anyways. I might just be wasting my time overthinking about this though.