[dead2sin]

I was mistaken about iLife 09. I just grabbed the 4.74gb iLife ’09.mpkg from the DVD and put that into InstaDMG without modification.

Nate

[dead2sin]

It *should* work to put them into existing user accounts, but if this is for an image that is being made, it really needs to be in the User Template. This ensures that all users get it properly and that it is uniform across the system.

What exactly is it blowing away? Those plists should really only touch Office 2011 stuff.

Nate

[dead2sin]

Office 2011 requires you to change the postflight script on the licensing package for it to be licensed properly.

iLife 09 I can confirm works perfectly as is without modificaiton. I believe I use a .dmg copy of the iLife 09 installer disc. I’ve never messed with iWork, but it sounds like Allister has you covered on that. Make sure you update to latest SVN, then report back your findings and maybe we can figure out what is causing the issues.

Nate

[dead2sin]

To clarify, with that droplet , just drop the Office Installer on it and it will do the rest 😀

Nate

[dead2sin]

No, it won’t work that way. The image InstaDMG spits out is an image of a factory-fresh hard drive. It isn’t an installer like the Install DVDs are.

The easiest way to restore the image would be to take an external firewire drive and put two partitions on it. Install a OS on one side and use it as a rescue OS and use the other partition as a storage drive. Dump your image on the Storage parition.

Just boot up a machine you want to image to the rescue OS side, open diskutil and restore the .dmg from the Storage parition on to the local drive of the machine you’ve booted.

DeployStudio also has a way of doing this, but I’ve never tried it.

Nate

[dead2sin]

I don’t use Munki with WGM, but I know the Head Dev does (Greg Neagle). I manage printers and print drivesr using munki as well as Flash, Flip4Mac, firefox, etc.

Here is a good list of what can be done: http://code.google.com/p/munki/w/list

Nate

[dead2sin]

Thats the right software.

I have internal documentation for Final Cut Studio 3 if you are interested, but it really should only be used if you have a system for managing your licenses in place and you use a site license.

Nate

[dead2sin]

I think munki is a much cleaner way of doing stuff over Radmind. Radmind isn’t bad, but I think munki is slightly better.

Nate

[dead2sin]

Its using the cached image again. It is back to working exactly how it should.

OP, double check your syntax for specifying the InstallerChoices. Make sure its exactly like this:

[code]Installer Choices File: /Users/admin/Desktop/InstaDMG1.6b2/InstallerFiles/InstallerChoices/InstallerChoicesNoRosetta.xml sha1:92ebd7ebdc4dd077a562e79ac2d4502dd966da5e
[/code]

Thats: Installer Choices file: Location Hash

If there are some other spaces in there at the end or the beginning, etc, it might get cranky 🙂

Nate

[dead2sin]

I just checked my logs and it is installing OS X every run instead of caching and it is not using the InstallerChoices file.

I specified an Installerchoices file in my 10.6_vanilla catalog and I’m doing another 2 builds to make sure that #1 It uses the installer choices (which it said it found at the beginning of the build, so I am sure that will work) and #2 I want to make sure on second run, it uses the cached image.

Nate

[dead2sin]

I kept my InstallerChoices file in BaseOS despite my OS Disc being in InstallerDiscs and I didn’t notice it reinstalling the OS (It seemed to use the cache as usual). I’m not sure what the right answer is on this one, perhaps Larkost can clear it up for it 🙂

Nate

[dead2sin]

I was just thinking about #1 again. Is there anything in the postflight of the package that seems to do the activation? Perhaps it is possible to get the software installed on the image and then have a first boot script do the activation.

Also, if you just install the package manually, does it ask for a serial # or is it a serialized package? Is activation part of the install, or is it another step after the .pkg has been installed?

#4 I have a 93gb lab image myself with Final Cut Studio 3, Pro Tools LE and Avid on it. I really wish I could make the image smaller, but I figure for what they are doing it is just the price of admission. We just reimaged 26 machines in a lab and it took just shy of 5 hours for all 26 to complete (It was a 93gb OS X image and a 10gb Windows image, dual boot). I think for large images like that, it is almost best to manage them wisely and do maintenance on them as much as possible rather then reimage them with any amount of regularity. I personally use Munki to this end (And I love it! – [url]http://code.google.com/p/munki/[/url])

Let me know if you figure anything about in regards to stashing the shared content on a folder somewhere. I had not really thought about it much, but if you get it working well I might look into doing the same.

Nate

[dead2sin]

#1 I’ve only use Flip4Mac WMV (The Free one) so I am not sure why Flip4Mac HD would be flakey upon activation. I assume it is a standard .pkg installer?

#2 Are you using the Firefox CCK? I have started doing all my Firefox settings using the CCK and as a result I just use the .dmg file from Mozilla’s website as is without any changes. (See [url]http://tinyurl.com/firefoxcck[/url]) I think using the CCK is by far the best way of accomplishing a customized Firefox install.

#3 I’ve noticed a corrupt database error only once or twice. It happened when I opened all 4 products within the space of a second. I’ve never had it happen opening only one at a time. As far as setting preferences, I also use User Templates and I find that to be good enough for my application. I know you can set settings such as format bar and whatnot if you make the change then yank it from the user folder.

Ask away if you have any other Questions/problems.

Nate

[dead2sin]

I checked the SVN and it looks like Karl added support for specifying an installer choice file.

Here is an example of how to use this functionality:

http://code.google.com/p/instadmg/source/browse/trunk/AddOns/InstaUp2Date/CatalogFiles/base-template.catalog?spec=svn387&r=387

Nate

[dead2sin]

As far as two createuser packages are concerned, make sure in your config file that you are not manually specifying the user GUID. They must be different, otherwise the second one will definitely fail.

As far as the other settings, if you poke around there is a lot of good info one some of those settings. I’ve never repacked iDVD myself, I generally just install all of iLife 09 or 08 as well as the updates. Final Cut Pro is easy to package if you have composer, but I’ve never tried it with PackageMaker, so I can’t promise it’ll package right up using it. Packaging up CS4 is tricky as well, I’ve never successfully done it with PackageMaker (I’ve tried!), but I know it can be done with Composer and perhaps one of the free ones as well.

Nate

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