[Anthony Reimer]

For those of you who are in an educational institution (or any other business, for that matter) that subscribes to Safari Books Online, the book is available there: [url]http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9780321591050[/url]. Looks really good at first glance!

Anthony

[Anthony Reimer]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: mattzago[/u][p]For pushing out the user profile specific files with Instadmg, I’ve just been sticking what I need into /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj. When a new user logs in the system creates the home folder from that template. …[/p][/QUOTE]

This worked splendidly! Thanks for the tip.

Anthony

[Anthony Reimer]

OK, I gave up on getting Microsoft’s packages to work, so I repackaged the original installer plus the 12.1.0 combo and the 12.1.1 delta. Works great. Found out through some testing that there are three plist files that are user-specific that I have kept outside of my main bundle. They are all in ~/Library/Preferences.

• com.microsoft.office.plist
Has the flag 2008\FirstRun\SetupAssistCompleted, plus the user name and initials.

• com.microsoft.setupassistant.plist
Has only one (innocuous) key, but this file seems like it needs to exist to confirm that Setup Assistant has done its work.

• com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist
This is only if you want to set the default to Manually or similar (of course, I guess you could remove MAU2 entirely).

LanRev InstallEase helped me make a nice little package that pushes those three files out to the local user directory, but of course, that would not work in InstaDMG. I did try to build a package that just had the three files and then made an mpkg with duplicate copies directed at each local home directory, but permissions seem to be a problem. Any thoughts on how to do this effectively would be welcomed.

Anthony

[Anthony Reimer]

So good news and bad news. The good news: the 12.1.0 updater does work with ARD. The bad news: it still doesn’t work with InstaDMG in my workflow. I checked out the Auto Update suggestion and it seems to be bundled with 12.1.0, so that shouldn’t make a difference. Anyone finding love out there on this one?

[Anthony Reimer]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: zanzan42[/u][p]According to the MS Office 2008 site, they posted an updated SP1 installer package that works with ARD. Supposedly, they fixed the bug that was causing ARD pushes of the MS package to fail.[/p][/QUOTE]

Could you perhaps provide a link to either the discussion or the changed updater? I re-downloaded the updater, tried it again and it continues to fail. I put it in the build process right after the Office 12.0 install package. (I am going to try installing the updater *after* the packages I use to customize the info and see if that changes anything, but if I don’t post back here, assume my attempt failed.)

Anthony

[Anthony Reimer]

OK, I have finally packaged up all the things that will make 12.0.0 work without user intervention on first launch (for any local accounts, that is). When I get them sorted into anything reasonable, I will post the contents here.

However, I want to go back to an earlier post which suggested that the update package for 12.0.1 doesn’t work within InstaDMG. I can confirm this for both 12.0.1 and 12.1.0. Mac OS 10.5.3 does not improve the situation.

Anthony

[Anthony Reimer]

I have a very basic (for now) InstaDMG-generated image that was using 10.5.2 combo to update 10.5.0 (source: OS Disc) until yesterday. I subbed in the 10.5.3 combo updater, took out Security Update 2008-002 (which, by Apple’s standard operating procedure, should be rolled into this update) and generated a new image. Worked perfectly; shows as 10.5.3 and no new bugs induced. My test machine is a Mac Pro (early 2008).

Anthony

[Anthony Reimer]

I’m going to jump out on a limb and ask what may be a naïve question: with applications that have a “silent install” like CS3, could we just install it onto the open disk image before it is compressed for ASR? I understand that this would require a change in InstaDMG, but it seems like a natural fit. Is there a technical limitation that I am unaware of? I’m not sure package making is the best solution here.

[Anthony Reimer]

I’ve been doing various testing with the Office 2008 bundle (pre-authorized volume licence). Not meeting with much success. Did a full install (with the existing package). It succeeded but required the authorization noted previously. I created a package with LanRev InstallEase and the resulting image with that package in the build train only eliminated the need to specify the user and company name; I still had to create a user, let it run a font installer check and then open up Microsoft Software Updater. Am going to try my copy of Composer to see if it gives me a better/different package.

Anthony

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