Hi Kevin, Kevin Landers wrote: > Can wpkg completely take a computer from fresh install to fully loaded? Well, not directly let's say. WPKG cannot deploy Windows itself as it is based on the principle to run on a finished Windows (base)-Installation. But WPKG can help you to create a full automated installation of your clients. Read on. > For example, in our office we have an automated Windows XP installation > CD that we pop in and when finished it gives us a pristine install > without prompting for anything. That's great. I also prepared some fully unattended CDs. Recently I moved to RIS (or RIS-Linux) to install the clients over the network. So either installing with RIS or using an unattended CD prepares a machine with a basic installation. So the only thing you have to do is to install WPKG client with an appropriate configuration after setup has finished. Personally I use cmdlines.txt method to enhance Windows setup. Commands listed within cmdlines.txt are run at T-13 during Windows setup. Here I just call a batch file which is inserting the WPKG client installation (along with a delayed reboot command) to the RunOnce registry key. So after rebooting the machine after setup (fully automatic) Windows will log on using an administrator account (one-time logon is enabled), then it installs WPKG client as specified by the RunOnce key and reboots the machine after ~30 seconds (another RunOnce entry). On next start WPKG starts to synchronize the software (wpkg.js /synchronize). The profile can either be hard-coded within the WPKG client configuration or (my preference) evaluated by hostname (see WINNT.SIF documentation on how to automatically generate hostnames which have a defined "prefix"). So WPKG automatically installs all software on the client while doing reboots as required (a package which needs reboot can indicate this within the package configuration). So after a few reboots (depending on your applications) your machine is ready to be used. Then you can ship it to your clients. Unless you uninstall WPKG client on the workstation it will continue to synchronize the software on each startup. As a result you might just update the package definitions on the server and all clients with access to the package share keep up-to-date automatically. > I am curious as to whether or not wpkg could then be set to install, run > and install each application needed on that machine in turn. I would > imagine there would be a need for reboots. There would be multiple > applications such as office suite, virus scanner, firewalls, etc. See above. > And with this in mind, how does wpkg handle GUI installers that do not > have a CLI method of install? WPKG does not directly handle GUI installers. The installer (any executable) needs to install the application silently. Almost all applications I know are supporting such a method (NSIS installer use /S switch, msi packages can use the /qn switch etc.). Applications which are not supporting any silent installation (like the current Azureus Vuze installer) need to be re-packed. Personally I usually crate a 7-Zip SFX archive of the installation directory, then put it onto a share and let WPKG just unpack that SFX archive to the %ProgramFiles% directory again. In some cases you just need to to some post-installation actions like creating icons or registering DLLs afterwards. All this can be done silently using batch scripts. Again, this needs to be done only in very rare cases as most installers are able to run silently. One of the main advantages of WPKG is that it is able to run any executable with any number of parameters (so it's not limited to MSI package deployment only). So feel free to share your experiences with specific programs on <http://www.wpkg.org/>. br, Rainer |