[tristan_mason]

I just had a good look at the presets for capturing in Composer and i’m rather excited! It can capture User Environment Settings. I had no idea these were even there…

BLOODY MARVELOUS

Now I can see how I can capture all the odds and sods I need not just software to round out the image. 😀

Thanks again for the pointers. This makes the instadmg route worthwhile and i retract the above statement suggesting that my requirements are too ambitious for instadmg.

Cheers

Tristan

[tristan_mason]

Hi Allister

Thanks for the great pointers! I’ve just purchased Composer and am going to have a crack at reverse engineering the CS5 installer as per the instructions on the forum (i’ll muddle through the bit where it says to “compare the two then drag the differing files into the main composer window). I’ll let you know how I get on.

I tried my best to use the deployment tool for CS5 but gave up. Just couldn’t get it to play nice with instadmg in any meaningful way much to my chagrin. I thought I was onto a winner there but alas nada! Are the Adobe packages in CS5 non Apple standard?

I’ll have to get the book on customisation as i can see that without a non GUI way of customising the Ui for profiles i’m a bit sunk and that is a major point for me. Giving our users a curated/tailored default profile every time they login.

I do have a snow server hear which I am not really using except for running Deploy Studio to deploy my Mac only images and the Mac volumes for the dual boot images. I’m kinda sold on DS all EXCEPT for the partitioning which really doesn’t cut it for our setup, again much to my chagrin. I’ve just rolled back to t he previous DS version as I hated the percentage slider method for drive partitioning. I have many machines with differing drive sizes and for dual boot/bootcamp it just made things messy. end DS rant.

You mention the preset for capturing CS3? Where would I find it and is it for Composer? Sorry if it’s an easy one like have a look in “x” menu. Am just knee deep in it at present. (just worked this out in Composer. THANKS for turning me onto this. I can now see some BIG time savings and less heartache!) genius…

I looked at casper suite but we can’t afford it this year so it’s all by hand as it where but hey, that’s how we learn right? Anyway I have ARD which I can use for any post deployment shenanigans that may transpire. I’m looking to get Casper Imaging Suite which may make things a little easier but i’m really hoping it will deal to the drive partitioning problem we ran into last year before semester one on the dual boot machines. Dunno. Bit of a wait and see with that one. It says on the Casper box it’ll do partitioning as per our requirements but…

I went to the AUC conference in Sydney this year which is where I did a workshop on instadmg and looked at Munki too. Since then i’ve been playing with insta but now actually building my first set of images so it’s nuts and bolts time. I’ve totally forgotten what we did with Munki so i’ll have to drag out the hand out and have a look. I do remember thinking it could be usefull at the time but i’ve no idea what for now. 😕

I’ve had the odd look at osxdeployment but yes, I should join and participate. That’s where I got the good oil for Office 2011 and instadmg.

As before, thanks for all the help.

Regards

Tristan

[tristan_mason]

Hi There
Thanks for the prompt reply. Only having a 10.6 disc I can see I need to update! It’ll save me about 20 mins in the scheme of things. I’m building pretty complicated (perhaps too ambitious for this tool) images for the uni here and am just trying to cut the time down if poss. I’ve been doing the monolithic method but have been turned on to the modular approach earlier this year and am convinced it is the way forward. It’s just a matter of getting everything working and reverse engineering the installers which so far with the help of the forum posts is going well. The greatest problem I face is profile customisation. We have a default profile and a log in hook and the profile is quite custom from the apple default. Having had a look it seems as though I will have to do most things with Plist customisation which I have had a small shot at. There seems to be no other way I can find and as we have a large user base so doing it per user is out of the question. At present I am focussing on getting all the software in the image. Once completed i’ll be looking closely at the customisation of the profile. I’ll probably get back to you then for further advice.

Do you have any further tricks for getting CS5 into an instadmg workflow? I can only find one which uses Composer and is not very explicit.

Regards
Tristan

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