[alantrewartha]

REVIVE

snow leopard DOES do this! HURRAY

unfortunately it’s doing it EVERY time! BOO

i don’t want to be notified that my password will expire in 29 days, but 2 or 3 days, that would be good. anyone know if i’m doign something wrong, or if there is a setting i can tweak?

[alantrewartha]

not me. i’m working with a 10.5.6 base now. got me a nice 10.5.8 build working well

[alantrewartha]

i’m using v211 instaDMG, and i’m finding that the MS office updates (sp1 sp2, 12.2.X) all crap out on me because the ‘quit running applications’ steps in the installers fail, and that’s the ‘preflight’ step, so the whole mpkg is abandoned.

to hack this do

find /path/to/updater.mpkg -name “quit_apps.app”

which will show you where the various quit apps are located, and what you are after are the perl scripts called ‘preflight’. comment out (with a #) BOTH lines near the end that start ‘exec’

you could probably blank the whole script in each case TBH, but this seems more clinical.

[alantrewartha]

turns out that the eval IS needed for reasons that elude my amateur unix eyes and it does run against a non-booted system (this means the password still becomes the expanded list of files and directories in the working directory!)

so you can add the script to a post install script in a pkg that runs against a non-booted system, or as a post-install script in deploystudio or wherever.

this does mean that it’s something peculiar to the instaDMG workflow that’s failing to execute these lines of script ok. but as the createuser script does work ok and along similar lines, there is probably a way to rewrite that chunk of code to effect the same end

[edit update]
could it be that dscl isn’t in the run path? i’ll try updating the itunes script with /usr/bin/dscl the NEXT time. (i noticed that createuser script uses the full path)

[alantrewartha]

it doesn’t look like it, no. sadly.

[alantrewartha]

(my absolute last post for a while, i hope.)

it’s not a straightforward dscl they’re doing at all, but EVAL dscl. huh? and of course that expands the password ‘*’ parameter. that’s an error right there! and perhaps that expansion fails under certain circumstances.

i can’t see any problem with just removing that eval, so i’m going to give that a go next time i run a build.

phew. what fun.

[alantrewartha]

basically the code in postinstall that makes the _usbmuxd user and group is failing. [edit: er, what ttpedersen said basically!]

i can’t see why – it LOOKS right – it’s done in that dscl localonly syntax. run it without all the kextload and launchctl lines, and your ipod is recognised again.

(slightly less importantly is a ‘reenumerate’ line that doesn’t run on the right system, so eg i get “found device 0x1103 when i rerun it – probably no big loss, whatever that device is)

[another edit update] HAHA it might be something to do with the passwd ”*’ line, which doesn’t seem to be the right syntax. after all ‘*’ is being expanded as the files in the current directory!

[code]# dscl /Local/Default -read /Users/_usbmuxd Password
Password:
Desktop
Desktop DB
Desktop DF
postinstall
preinstall
[/code]
or is this an upshot of the instaDMG environment?

[alantrewartha]

YES. totally just discovered this problem with my 10.5.8 build chain 🙁

i did a delete of the main app and a manuall reinstall from the mpkg and it’s good again. probably just the ‘mobile device support’ sub package like you say.

[edit update] Yes, just installing the mobile device support again does the job.

[alantrewartha]

FINALLY got what looks like a working 10.5.8 out!

don’t know what finally tipped it, but i DO know that the last attempt i mentioned here (rev211, 10.5.6 installer + 10.5.8 combo) only seemed to fail, because in the messing around with different versions of IDMG i missed out the essential clearreg and createuser PKGs

i am 1 x idiot

now to see how well this rolls. mail is correctly updated. let’s see if Office works etc.

[alantrewartha]

still no luck.

i’ve cleared out my caches in case something was up there.

i’ve tried v211 just now too. still nothing. this time i get a boot up to a grey screen 🙁

[alantrewartha]

i meant 10.5.6 and 5.8 updater. anyway FAIL there. clicking on Mail it says “You can’t run this version of Mail on this version of OSX”! (it’s still on 3.5)

i wonder if it’s the 10.5.6 install disk i got with the nehalem macs. (odd thing i noticed with this install disk – no “Desktop Pictures” folder in /Library/)

gonna try with the older 10.5 install disk (10.5.2??)…

[alantrewartha]

chris – what version is your OS base.

I’ll have a go at 10.5.5 plus the new 10.5.8 combo this afternoon…

[alantrewartha]

🙁

i have run with an ipfw ruleset which is ok, but a lot less satisfactory.

[alantrewartha]

not having much fun, but I’m going to persist with rebooting and trying again. working on the 210 build, problems i have encountered so far:

safari 4 – i gather this is a known issue, to do with either being in the new flat format, or because a preflight check fails to work inside the instadmg compilation process

InstallerChoices.xml i used for the main office install no longer works – i suspect i need to re-write it in the new format?

10.5.7 combo install is still messing up somewhere. Although I no longer get the ‘old Mail.app’ symptom – I’m still getting a persistent issue the main symptom of which is that Word crashes on launch. if i stay on 10.5.6 and install office all is well, but with the combo update in the install chain, word becomes unusable.

and it’s no longer installing the Office updates either 🙁 so i end up having to apply the SP1 (and now SP2) updates manually afterwards.

i’m going to try going back to the old 1.4b4 version and stay 10.5.6. has anyone tried the 10.5.7 delta? (i’ll give it a spin, but the only thing that depends on having 10.5.7 is safari4, so no big deal at the mo)

EDIT UPDATE
using the 10.5.7 delta in the install chain allowed me to also include the safari4 installer, and amazingly i ended up with a working Word. but Mail.app is back at v3.5 (10.5.6 version)

[alantrewartha]

cheers for that. i did try that quite quickly after that last failure, and the OS seemed fine, but appeared to fail installing some of my CustomPKG folders. i’m going to run it again to check as my mac was in a bit of a state at that point…

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