The order of things…

[tristan_mason]

Me again…

I’m just wondering how people find the best order to put things in your instaDMG work flow other than by trial and error which when you have a lot of software and a large final image size (like me) can be somewhat time consuming. I can get 2 complete run throughs a day of the full image at present unless I leave stuff out that I know works fine. So leaving stuff out is what I have been doing as well as using composer to build custom builds of software for example iLife 09. I can build a single, fully patched iLife 09 pkg using composer which means i don’t have to use the base installer then add the updates in my work flow. This saves a bit of time each run through as well as reducing the number of moving parts to use a mechanical analogy.

I’m just trying to work out what interacts with what in the process and if there is a great deal of importance to be placed on which installers go where in the scheme of things and if there are repercussions of the interactions between certain installers eg: is it better to put CS5 before iLife 09 or not or does it matter at all or, does Office 2011 effect CS5 or Final Cut Studio if placed after it on the work flow.

Perhaps this is an over analytical way of looking at the process but I have 3 master images to make for the beginning of semester 1 next year usually done monolithically. The largest is around 90 gig and contains some heavy app packages and i’m just trying to best out of the process and avoid any pitfalls.

Regards

Tristan

[bw38]

Interesting question. I haven’t followed any particular order and I’ve been using my own images that I’ve created to test them out. No problems that I can tell. Here’s my work flow:
OS X Updates
Applications (FireFox, GIMP, VLC Player, Flash, Flip4Mac, Office 2011, iLife 09)
iLife Updates
System configurations (clearReg, createUser)

Everything seems to work without any problems that I can tell. But I’m far from done. Right now as we speak I’m testing out Final Cut Studio 3 (holy cow what a huge install). I still have to add other programs like Adobe CS4, Cisco VPN software, SPSS 19. And then work through user configuration settings I want to use on all accounts.

Although it probably saves you time to leave out packages you know function, I don’t necessarily do that all the time. I feel more secure if I keep running the same packages every time along with whatever new packages I’m adding. This is particularly useful for me because every so often I find myself wiping my hard drive out and using the image I’ve just created (as mentioned earlier). I think it’s the only way to really tell if you’re going to run into problems. As an example, I had added the Cisco VPN software package to my image and thought it was working fine (so it seemed). But it wasn’t. And I ignored the fact that it wouldn’t load. Then noticed I was getting messages about a kext file missing or that has been corrupted. I was able to eliminate the problem easily and avoid future headaches since I was using the image I’m going to be deploying.

Not sure if it is helpful or not, but that’s been my experience thus far.

[tristan_mason]

Am just baking a complete image as I type. The mother of all tests so to speak. It’s my base image for staff. All other iterations will be based on it.

I too will be adding Final Cut Studio 3 and SPSS 19 so i’ll share my experience once i’ve had a crack at it. Composer as a pre-bult script for SPSS but it’s for version 13. I have emailed them and asked them if they can build an update for it. I installed SPSS 19 yesterday and used a snapshot difference file to try and make a pkg. It seemed to do the trick until I tried to use it, no go. It’s a bit of a tricky software package what with it’s licensing and all. I’ll keep you posted as to my progress.

I’ve got to add Logic Express and Final Cut Express on another Image but there are quite a few forum posts for those. I feel like i’m over the hump for most of it.

Regards

Tristan

[Allister Banks]

Hey Tristan,

I’m going to take this a slightly different direction to hopefully give a more direct answer
1. Best practices from experience have been always ‘OS first’, since that’s the foundation and you need to know wether whatever version of 3rd-party software you installed is compatible with the most current patch level of the OS
2. You’ll notice some hackery necessary to get iLife 09 to not nag about updates that should have run, you need to run iLifeSupport9.0.4 and iLifeSlideshow after the main iLife.mpkg installs.
3. You’ll notice Acrobat will de-serialize if you install the rest of CS after it(Nate tell me if I’m wrong), and then hackery is still necessary to get it to launch properly under standard accounts

And workflow wise, putting your newly-built package on top of your most recently-pronounced-good bare image before booting it is a faster way to test things, since it’s nearly the same conditions as InstaDMG and takes less time. You can tell a good amount about what a package you built will do even before it boots, if you ask me. I do a dry run of each package I’m testing without even 10.6.4 combo, but do leave my createUser/firstboot stuff in there each time, normally I’d leave it to last(it barks at me while it’s running so I know its almost done).

I can’t tell the gotcha’s for too many other suites or the interactions between them ’cause I haven’t needed to include them in a build yet.

my 2¢,
Allister

[tristan_mason]

Hi Allister

I’ve found with iLife that Composer has taken most of the hassle out of it as it builds a fully patched pkg. In fact Composer has taken a lot of dog work out of the whole thing for a lot of what we use like CS5, iLife, Perian, OpenOffice etc etc with its pre-built diff files. Apps like Keyserve and Sophos too. The rest i’ve got from here which has been a great place to get the good oil.

I was sort of wondering out loud what would happen if an app was going to mess with an account or vice versa in the process but now that I have created an almost complete master minus a thing or two I can see that most interactions are pretty straight forward. All part of the learning process and seeing if instadmg did everything that I would normally do when creating master images monolithically. I’ve now satisfied myself that it can do almost everything I would have done. I’ve also been turned onto better ways of doing things perhaps too such as MCX and Workgroup and First boot Scripts.

All good stuff.

Regards

Tristan

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