Anyone willing to share common MSI packages with me?

[roland]

Hi,

 

I am on a steep learning curve with MSI's and Active Directory and can't quite get my head around the idea that MSIs are not readily downloadable and deployable for products like

 

Quicktime 7.x

Flash for IE7

Shockwave for IE7

RealPlayer for IE7

Promethean Software and other common education products.

 

I was hoping to find a source for ready made MSI's as I am about to re-deploy the lab computers (30) and this time I plan to have a base install of XP Pro and MS Office 2003 then other poducts will be deployed as MSI files.

 

look forward to advices and possible donations of MSI files.

 

tx. Roly

[mullet_man]

Flash Player and Shockwave Player can be obtained direct from Adobe.

 

http://www.adobe.com/licensing/distribution/

 

Click on apply for license, put in your details and they email you a link to the MSI files.

 

Simple!!!

 

Sharing MSIs is against the rules, so you'll have to obtain them yourself I guess.

[Ric_]

@roland: I recommend http://www.appdeploy.com for info on creating MSIs. Another great tool is the Windows Installer Wrapper Wizard (WIWW) which allows you to turn silent installs into MSIs through a wizard interface.

 

I generally installer Quicktime and Realplayer using a script that runs after RIS completes... the silent installs for these are:

 

QuickTimeInstaller /S

and

RealPlayer10-5GOLD.exe /s

[roland]

Thanks,

 

Can you please tell me more about RIS, how hard is it to set up? I have been using Acronis to deploy my images manualy, i.e burned to a cd and then I get students to role them out.

 

btw - Im the only IT guy in a school of 120PCs and 420 students and 3 servers. 1 Moodle an a school website and Im on a tight budget.

 

so back to RIS - is it worth implementing? do we have a grassroots howto setup a school - I am happy to change the way I deploy if it lightens my load.

 

(I still cant help wishing it was not against the rules to share MSI's.)

 

Thanks for the help so far,

 

tx. Roly

[Ric_]

RIS (or WDS as we should really call it) isn´t that hard to set up. You need to install it in legacy mode mind!

 

http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7354 and http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1871 are good places to start

[Geoff]

Do you really need legacy mode? Will it not deploy XP in native mode?

[plexer]

Looks like you can:

 

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=971277&SiteID=17

 

Ben

[ZeroHour]

Goto http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7462 for a guide on packaging Promethean software.

[MkII]

Sharing MSIs is against the rules, so you'll have to obtain them yourself I guess.

 

Roguespear on the MSFN forums posts MSIs for all the most common free apps..

[contink]

Lemme see now... Here's the resources I use currently:

 

- RIS

There's a lot of info out there but basically if you follow the basic installation instructions to get it installed on your server and put a base install image (XP sp2 is a good choice) on.

 

Once you've done that, you could look all the info on sysprep, etc.. or at some tools to help create your own setup images and upload them to relevant directory.

 

Tools I'm using for this are:

 

Autoimage (by Roguespear)

http://www.doitrightconsulting.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3

 

- RyanVM

http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/

 

- nLite

http://www.nliteos.com/

 

- DriverPacks

http://driverpacks.net/

 

 

 

As for MSI's this is a very useful resource outside of appdeploy:

- RogueSpear (register and then visit the Releases forum)

http://www.doitrightconsulting.net/forum/index.php

 

 

Can't recommend enough going for some basic apps:

- quicktime alternative and realplayer alternative (instead of the bloatware original versions).

 

 

Well worth looking into how you do command line installs too as this tends to help make sense of the whole appdeploy suggestions in this area:

 

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/32/

.. and all the "intermediate" pages are good places to start.

 

 

Hope that helps..

[jsnetman]

We used to use the USB method and worked quite well, but on the last upgrade I was determined to get all PCs to boot from lan. I was already using ghost and never got my head around how you integrated all the drivers for different PCs onto a RIS image so I stuck with ghost. So now use boot to RIS, RIS then loads a ghost image. Takes about 15 minutes to rebuild 30 machines to the OS stage. I spent a lot of time getting a ghost image to cover all my PCs so didn't find the need to pursue the RIS image, I may change my mind later when having to repurchase ghost licences.

 

P.S. The driver packs website looks good contink, glad I read this thread.

[Arcolite]

I spent the last half term putting in a WDS server to replace our bloated Ghost images.

 

Well worth doing. I've now got a fully automated XPSP2 deployment. Just press F12, boot to Lan then walk away...the scripts and gpos do the rest.

 

I can build an entire lab of 30 PC's in about 10mins. We also have a program called DeepFreeze on the workstations that refreshes the build on every restart (without a startup time hit).

 

As for MSI, Universal Extractor and AppDeploy are my best friends.

[projector1]

i am still using ghost to deploy images as this means that none of the IT support staff need to go into the bios, this used to be an issue before as if you do not set the boot order back to hdd only after changing it, a major security breach was waiting to happen.

The ghost console allows you to dump an image from the server aswell as clone a batch of machines remotelly.