There are Live CDs that boot up an OS and allow you to use it without installation.
I was wondering if there is an easy way to customize a Live CD so that it only loads what is necessary to run one application, and runs that application.
With Ubuntu I used the Ubuntu Customization Kit to customize an Ubuntu Live CD that loaded the stuff I needed by default in my computer.
For some values of "easy way" yes, but in most cases no.
If the required OS is Windows, you'll find a lot of information if you check out BartPE. You'll have licensing problems if you don't understand that you can't distribute windows OS, even on a livecd, without MS licenses for each copy.
Linux livecds are a little more complex to create, but there are many people making the process easier, http://www.linux-live.org/ is a great resource to get started.
-Adam
That depends what you mean by "easy way". If you're comfortable installing and administering an OS to be secure and stable, you shouldn't have much trouble creating a LiveCD for that OS with the software you need installed and auto-running. Much more detail depends very much on the OS and type of application you're trying to run.
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I am finding a way to making an installer for my program on MacOS, which has the capability to creating a good GUI installer and doing something pre and post installation like having the program run on startup, ...
(like InnoSetup on Windows http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php). I have found such a tool like this that is InstallBuilder https://installbuilder.bitrock.com/ but it is not free (and on my view has a high price). Does anybody knows a suitable tool for me?
Thank you so much
Whenever you need to create an installation package or distribution for Mac OS X 10.5 or later, Packages is the powerful and flexible solution.
I have a C# application that works great in Linux and Windows. Now I want to make an installation package for the Mac OS but I don't have anything running it in order to develop it / test it. The software is open source, so I don't want to put money into buying yet another laptop just to test it.
Is there a way to create some kind of installer / package for this C# application without actually needing to have a Mac? I even made a .deb package for Linux. Isn't it possible to somehow convert it?
It depends on how fancy you want to get with the installer. I'd start with something simple like building a package for Homebrew.
That's all command-line, though. If you think your Mac users would be unhappy installing an running from the command-line, you'll have to look into more sophisticated solutions. Mac GUI applications are traditionally built into .app bundles. Unfortunately for you, C# does not have lots of support for cross-compiling to the Mac. It's possible, but it's going to take a lot of trial and error, which will be way more frustrating without a test machine to see if you're doing it right.
You might try CPack (part of CMake). CMake doesn't really do C# (otherwise it'd be perfect for you), but you may be able to point CPack at the completed binaries and get it to bundle them up for the Mac for you. You could also use CMake/CPack to build a dummy Mac application and then you'd be able to swap out all the pieces for your own binaries.
we have a small app that doing trivial stuff, no GUI.
we was using Linux, but the library/framework available for Linux is highly less than that for windows, it was such a pain to develop under Linux.
So we want to use windows, but windows is too big for the trivial app, is there any solution that i can use windows and not losing OS's lightweight?
any advices appreciated.
What kind of applications are you building?
1) some older versions of windows have less bloat, but you wouldn't want these running on public networks because they don't get security updates. Plus, the latest/greatest libraries may not run on them
2) If you're running command-line server utilities, you could try Windows 2008 Server Core, which is a console-only installation
3) You might want to try Wine or Mono to run your windows/.NET framework-based application.
You should try a "Windows PE" (sometimes also called "minint") installation (installation guide here), which is a trimmed-down version based on Windows XP or Vista.
This does not make sense, sorry. If you have a CLI program under Linux why shouldn't you be able to write on CLI program on Windows?
When I'm testing software I'm going to deploy or running through tests in the Windows world, I'll use VMWare images so that I can start from a fresh, known state at the beginning of each test. This has worked really well so that I can install software on different OS flavors or with other/different apps and drivers loaded. This makes it super simple to duplicate or nearly duplicate a customer's environment when addressing issues that crop up.
Now I'm tasked with doing something similar for Mac OS X. I'm far less familiar with this OS and didn't really see the same sort of thing available. I noted that the server version of 10.5 might allow this, but I'm not running that here. I've got access to 10.5 on a Mac Book and one of those Mac Minis.
Has anyone used Time Machine to put their test Mac box into a known state? Or do you have other ideas? I'm also interested in a solution for 10.4 since some of my customers run "Tiger".
I tend to test things that don't manipulate the global computer state (i.e. a lot of well written Cocoa applications) with the "Guest" account. Since Tiger (I think), the effects of using this account are wiped at logout, so you can easily get a virgin environment again.
By default, Time Machine excludes certain paths from backup. This could be detrimental to your testing strategy, depending on the system resources that your software touches. See this article for information on the exclusions. At a bare minimum, if you are going to use Time Machine to rollback, make sure nothing you are testing depends on any of the excluded files.
But, I think there is a better alternative, if you can live with Mac OS X Server: VMWare Fusion provides support for virtualizing instances of Mac OS X Server Leopard. Then you can use the same strategy you used for Windows.
From http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/features.html
VMware Fusion boasts the most complete
OS support, supporting more than 60
operating systems in a virtual
machine, including Windows XP, Windows
Vista, and even Mac OS X Server.
Keep in mind, you cannot virtualize Mac OS X Client due to license restrictions, though.
An alternative (perhaps more lightweight) solution that I just found recently is an app called RooSwitch. It lets you swap configurations for an application. So you could have a bunch of different prefs files, cache files, etc for your app and create a named configuration for it. You can create multiple configurations to test new user setup, or to reproduce an issue using a customer's data without losing your own config. RooSwitch then lets you switch between all these different configs.
I haven't used it myself yet, but heard about it on a podcast recently and thought it sounded useful for my own development and testing.
I am looking for a recommendation on an installer program. The installer needs to support mulitple OS's - Solaris, Linux and Windows. I have three build machines each running one of the OS's. Currently using the same code base - JAVA and C/C++ for all three.
InstallAnywhere seems to be the dominant player.
IzPack is a an open source software installer generator. All you need is a JRE on the target platform.
Maybe is my personal opinion but I think that the installer is probably the only thing that you may want to keep platform specific and here is why:
it is good to integrate with platform specific deployment systems like: RPM or DEB on Linux, DMG on OS X or MSI under Windows. By using them and allowing both UI and silent installation you will easy the installation of the product for individuals and also for enterprise environments - where it's common to push the installations to the clients.
you can add move the configuration screens outside the installer and trigger them first time when the user runs your application
also do not forget to minimize installer complexity - each "feature" you add will cost you more specially on QA.
You can take a look at BitRock InstallBuilder It supports all the platforms you mention, and it does not depend on Java (though you can use it to install Java programs, in fact many of our customers use it for that, including Sun Microsystems :)
Does it need to be a client-based installer for wide distribution, or just intranet?
For corporate LANs, sometimes setting up a Java Webstart page is the best solution; the customers always have access, they can make desktop shortcuts to the launcher to run just like a standard application, and you have absolute control for pushing updates.