Adobe CS4 Products

[dead2sin]

Sorry if i’m abusing the forums here, but I have yet another question =)

Has anyone here put any of the Adobe CS4 products on their images? (Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, etc).

The Acrobat 9 Pro package I have works fine, but the others do not. The packages were made using Adobe’s method of silent installs.

Regardless of how my packages are made, I was wondering if someone had a good method for installing CS4 onto their images. If so, some suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks again,

Nate

[larkost]

The CS Suite does not use .pkg for the install method, so it will not fit directly into an InstaDMG workflow. You can repackage the results of the installer, but then you are going to run into all of the nasty details about the CS Suite. Here are a few hints of what I found doing this:
[list]
[*] You need to be using a volume license, anything requiring activation is not going to be pleasant
[*] You can’t do piecemeal installs. So you can’t have one thing that installs Photoshop, and then add another that adds InDesign. You have to instal everything you want in one shot. Adobe has a couple of databases that get overwritten in bad ways if you do anything else. If you need different layout, then you need to have multiple packages that have everything that that install type needs.
[*] You are going to have to play around a bit. It is probably not going to work the first time.
[/list]
If you get a chance, talk to Adobe about these problems.

[dead2sin]

Alrighty. Adobe has a method of installing it that allows you to put it into a .pkg format (basically it runs the install from the .pkg). The postflight script on the package launches the installer silently. This works quite well on fully booted systems because it detects if any other products are installed and if shared components are installed, it doesn’t reinstall them. The problem with this is that each package is pretty big (each have the shared components).

I didn’t personally make the packages, so I cannot give you specifics on how this was done (our previous image developer did).

I’ll see what I can figure out. This is gonna be a huge pain I think =)

Nate

[randygordon]

I’ve created a CS4 package with JAMF Composer.
Very simple. Well work the $99.

[dead2sin]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: randygordon[/u][p]I’ve created a CS4 package with JAMF Composer.
Very simple. Well work the $99.[/p][/QUOTE]

Which version do you have? I think I actually have version 5.1 (just found it on our server…the previous image dev knew about it but I was never told that we had it…lol)

Nate

[dead2sin]

I called composer and got the serial # for the version we had. We originally had version 6, but they upgraded us to version 7 for free.

Version 7 is AMAZING at first glance. It can build packages from already-installed programs via pre-made diff files. I’m testing it out right now on our CS4 applications, we’ll see how it does.

I’m quite impressed with it at first glance, but I’m going to test it a while and see if it really is that amazing (Seems too good to be true).

Nate

[macsamurai]

Just tried making a CS4 pkg with Composer 7 and all seemed fine, but when and of the installed apps are launched, CS4 wants to be re-serialized (it was serialized properly when it was installed on the system the package was built on and launched successfully several times before the pkg was built). This would even be ok, but it won’t even accept our volume license serial number. Is there a trick to deploying the pkg with the serialization intact? It works as expected with CS3.

[dead2sin]

Did you do the filesystem change method or the diff-based method?

I installed all the products, then select make a package from all installed adobe products. The package it created worked great.

When you open the product, it asks you to accept the agreement and thats it. No re-serialization or anything.

Nate

[kennyj]

I had great success so far with CS3 using InstallEase and iceberg. You can output your diff from InstallEase into iceberg where you can modify it a bit more by hand. I have not tried CS4 yet, but I wouldn’t think it is much different.

[cranappras]

Did you run into any post-install errors when testing out your CS3 package? I’ve attempted making a CS3 package with InstallEase / Iceberg and also with Composer 7, but both resulted in errors when attempting to launch on of the programs post-install.

The specific error that I keep getting is: “An unexpected and unrecoverable problem has occurred because you do not have the necessary access privileges. Photoshop will now exit.”

This has been encountered with both the snapshot method and with Composer’s method of automatically repackaging a pre-existing CS3 installation.

Thoughts? The account I was using was an admin account and the OS was 10.5.7 .

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