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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH
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 Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 8:53 am Post subject: Customizing the NeoOffice installer for large volume setups |
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I touched on this elsewhere: I get the idea that corporations, NGOs, schools, universities, etc. could do with a NeoOffice installer that presets a couple of things for their users.
I am wondering if someone would care for funding this. One or several large volume users should have resources to get this done.
I was also wondering if such a feature could be made commercially: get the normal NeoOffice for free, get a gadget to customize your installer for $1000. Considering the amount of admin time you will save in a large organisation, that should be attractive. Of course, there is the GPL, which seems to conflict with my thinking here...
Best wishes,
Oscar
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"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
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OPENSTEP
The One
Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
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| Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 9:58 am Post subject: |
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No it would be possible for someone to make a commercial installer to deal with this sort of thing without any license violations. The installer is a completely separate program from Neo itself, so it doesn't fall under any licensing restrictions.
I may be wrong, but I believe most of the large volume installs use Apple Installer and the .pkg file to do the installation part...you can use command line installer (/usr/sbin/installer) pretty well to do this without any GUI at all. In theory it would be possible to put together a second small command line tool that could then apply predefined preferences and put them into the share directory for all users on the computer (and fix their permissions of course). This does assume that the networks are configured to allow administrators remote SSH access...
I also really don't know if OS X Server itself has any tools for managing package deployment.
ed |
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Samwise
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Apr 25, 2006
Posts: 2315
Location: Montpellier, France
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| Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 10:13 am Post subject: |
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| I thought installing NeoOffice with the command-line installer wasn't supported ? |
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OPENSTEP
The One
Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
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| Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 11:49 am Post subject: |
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I honestly have never tried it myself. In general we don't support any command line functionality but I don't know about installation. Just putting out an engineering approach that I could think of for doing something like this 
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Samwise
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Apr 25, 2006
Posts: 2315
Location: Montpellier, France
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| Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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| IIRC Patrick closed a bug at some point because the reporter was trying to install NeoOffice from the command line, which (still IIRC) wasn't supported even for installation ... |
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OPENSTEP
The One
Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
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| Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 1:21 pm Post subject: |
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If that's the case then perhaps this request may require more engineering infrastructure than I originally thought.
ed |
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Samwise
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Apr 25, 2006
Posts: 2315
Location: Montpellier, France
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OPENSTEP
The One
Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
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| Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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Perhaps that's the fundamental request...to get automated command line install functional without a running WindowServer?
ed |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 9:57 am Post subject: |
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I use the command line installer myself all of the time:
| Code: | | sudo /usr/sbin/installer -pkg /path/to/the/NeoOffice.pkg/folder/after/opening/the/downloaded/dmg/file -target / |
Patrick |
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 2:34 pm Post subject: |
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In that case it might be nice to e-mail the reporter of bug 579 and ask him if it works now (2 years later). Just to be cordial and complete about it.
Best wishes,
Oscar
_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 5:05 pm Post subject: |
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| ovvldc wrote: | | In that case it might be nice to e-mail the reporter of bug 579 and ask him if it works now (2 years later). Just to be cordial and complete about it. |
Bug 579 has nothing to do with the installer. That bug is caused by someone having a horked Mac OS X installation. The "Error verifying neoofficej package contents: The Bill of Materials for this package was not found." error is the Mac OS X installer tool falling over, not any of our custom installer scripts.
Patrick |
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 11:26 pm Post subject: |
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OK, I see. My apologies.
best wishes,
Oscar |
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