I am considering writing a book on re-packaging applications into MSI format.

It occurred to me that there is no single source of information for a new application packager to pick up in order to get up to speed.

There is plenty of material from Wise and Installshield on how to use their products, but none of these give you the smarts to take your packaging to the next level. There is also Phil Wilson’s excellent book on Windows Installer; but this focuses on building MSI’s from scratch using Visual Studio/Orca, rather than working from a snapshot.

Topics may include;

• Troubleshooting ICE errors. There is information in a thousand places on the web, but it’s not all in one place.
• Making installers work for both 32 and 64 bit platforms.
• Real world custom actions. This could cover sub-topics such as changing file/registry permissions, installing certificates and setting properties that the standard MSI tables can use i.e. setting a value in the registry table based on the contents of a file in the home directory of a user.
• What to do when you have no choice but to snapshot an existing MSI package.
• Getting around crafty custom actions in existing MSI’s. Some manufacturers only use the shell of the MSI. All the hard lifting is done by their custom actions which can make creating transforms far more complicated than it needs to be.

I am posting this here in the hope that others can let me know if;

• They feel that there is enough of an audience here to make this a worthwhile project.
• There are specific topics that should be included in such a work that the packaging community would like to see.
• Anyone would like to contribute in exchange for their name in the credits (which would look great on a resume!) and maybe if substantial enough a contribution, a portion of the royalties.

Please let me know your thoughts

Richard

As per usual, make sure that you back everything up before making changes to your system. I am not responsible for your stuff ups!

I was attempting to deploy an image created with MDT 2008 (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) to a VMWare virtual machine. After PXE booting my WIM image, Windows PE did not have a network card present that could talk to the deployment server (It worked first time using Citrix XenServer!)

Here is my test environment;

I have created two virtual machines on a test VMWare ESXi box.
VM One has Windows 2003, MDT 2008 and Windows Deployment Services.

VM Two is the VM I am attempting to build via MDT installed on VM one.

After mucking around with injecting the vmware drivers, changing the network card type and recreating WIM’s ad infinitum, I found out the the VMX file for the test VM was missing a couple of essential entries.

Adding the following lines worked for me;
ethernet0.startConnected = “true”
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
ethernet0.addressType = “generated”

I made the changes, uploaded them using the data store browser, started the VM, and voila!

Whilst attempting to stream Office 2007 from a test Citrix box to a desktop, I encountered this bizarre error.

Unable to find a suitable version for your operating system/language/boot drive (0xE000192)

The target was correct (The same VM had previously been used to create the profile).

After some digging around, I found an article on Citrix’s web site that appeared to explain the problem.
Click here for Article.

It turns out that the real time scanner of the Anti-Virus (In this case McAfee) on the XenApp server was attempting to scan the cab file when the streaming plugin was trying to access the profile.

The cab file in this case is around 950MB and so takes some time to scan, by which time the streaming plugin has given up.

When the real time scanner was disabled (A temporary measure until the anti-virus policy is updated!!), the streaming of Office 2007 finished correctly.

It is also worth looking at the article about switching on debugging for the Streaming plugin which can be found here.

Cheers

Richard

Okular is the new PDF reader for KDE 4. It is also capable of displaying DjVu and CHM files.

One anomaly is that there is no option to clear the list of recently opened documents from the menu. Even clearing the most recently used list from the KDE 4 Menu does not clear the list within Okular.

It comes down to having to manually edit a file. The file in question can be found in your home directory.

Using my PC as an example, the file can be found at;

/home/Richard/.kde/share/config/okularrc

Close Okular first. Edit this file and delete the lines under [Recent Files]. Save the file, then restart Okular.

If anyone knows an easier way to achieve this, please let me know!

Disclaimer: Back up your data first!  Do not attempt to re-size hard disks or partitions unless you have a reliable backup of your virtual machine.  I will not accept liability for your stuff ups!

It’s nice to know that you can do this under VMware Workstation as well as with VMware server.

I had a virtual machine originally being used as a test environment.  This VM became so useful, I thought that rather than re-create a production version I would simply increase the hard disk size and memory allocation.

After installing the Adobe flash plugin within Firefox on my Fedora 9 box, I could not get the sound to work at all on sites such as YouTube.

A quick google told me that I had to install libflashsupport.

After running ‘yum install libflashsupport‘ , everything was well with the world.  This library allows Pulse Audio to work with flash apparently.

If I can find the original source of this fix, I’ll be sure to update this post with an acknowledgement – They saved me a lot of time!

Cheers

I recently installed Lyx on my Windows PC at work (To help me work out a correct document layout without the distractions of Microsoft Word).

As a part of the complete Windows install package, the typesetting programme: MikTex is installed.

When I attempted to update MikTex after installation, I struggled to get the proxy authentication working correctly.  The solution it seems (For me anyway) was to not specify http:// in the proxy address box under connection settings.  Just typing in the IP address of the Microsoft proxy server allowed this to work correctly.

Weird.