capdigital

Hey, thanks for the tip. Actually I did know the autoit scripts can be compiled since I have half of the ones I use already done that way. just hadn't thought about it in this context. Sometimes you need someone else to point you in the right direction. I will continue following the development of WPI since I think it's has great potential for mutilple configuration/ system managers like myself. Cheers, Craig

Just for reference in case anyone else is trying to use WPI the way I was, here is what I found: 1) WPI seems to not like network shares to run from. The interface runs fine in configuration mode. But the installer.js seems to have a few problems. When trying to reboot and continue installing... I constantly received errors - always error in line xxx. Object Expected. I'm assuming (although I have very little programming background) that a drive letter on a network is treated as a different kind of object than a physical drive (like the CD-Rom). As long as WPI doesn't have to reboot it runs fine from the Network until the very end. 2) With regards to Autoit and the full desktop: The installer.js contains the commands to write registry entries for rebooting. I had success with chaning the reboot/reinstall from runonceex to runonce. I also had success just disabling the reg keys altogether and having wpi run from the startup folder at boot time. WPI conveniently asks if you want to continue with the previous install. It would have been easy to disable the continue button so it would continue automatically but WPI kept crashing because of #1. 3) I did find out that if WPI resides locally on the C: drive but all the installation programs run on the network that I had less problems. Since this isn't the option that I was looking for I skipped trying to figure out the errors. 4) Slipstreaming dmx's Internet Explorer 7 with Nlite sets the intranet zone to medium secuirty and gives a dialogue box "The publisher cannot be verified" click ok. I was able to get around that by setting the intranet zone to low security from cmdlines.txt on my nlite created cd by adding: reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\1" /v "Flags" /t REG_DWORD /d 219 /f I will say that WPI is very cool. If and when I need to make a boot DVD I will likely use it. In the meantime I've just gone back to the boring old command window and batch scripts. Not pretty but it's working well. After seeing this project I'm half tempted to write an autoit script with a pretty point and click on the scripts I want to run.

Hello, Thank you for WPI! it's a great utility. Although I've been bashing my head for a couple of days trying to make it do something it probably wasn't quite meant for. I would like to use it to delpoy software on a bunch of machines. (Yes I know there are other solutions like RIS, Imaging, etc...) But I love the simplicity of software managment with WPI. And I'm sooooo close. The problem I'm having is that I have a number of applications that I've written some very badly hacked Autoit scripts to install. The scripts work fine when launched with the desktop active (ie. just loading up wpa.hta and clicking on begin install). But when wpi gives a reboot command, the next time it starts is during runonceex, before the desktop is loaded. At that point my autoit scripts just hang - which looks like a timing issues that I haven't been able to resolve. What I would like to do is have wpi restart after reboot from the administrators startup folder. That way the full desktop would be loaded and my misbehaving autoit scritps would likely install properly. I realize there are other ways to package silent installs but I find that autoit is just fast for what we are doing. (Installing Autodesk maya for instance) What I tried was removing the reg.write commands for runonceex that launch WPI on reboot. I modified the installer.js and commented out the two lines responsible for writing the runonceex code. Then on reboot I've tried to restart WPI with the same command line that runonceex was using %wpipath%\wpi\common\installer.hta But I get errors every time it tries to restart - the wpi dialog comes up but usually it's blank and typically followed by a script error or two. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might proceed? How I might change the reboot process to run from a full desktop rather than at runonceex? Thank you in advance for any help. BTW. I'm using an Nlite disk that installs xp unattneded then maps the z: drive to a network share and runs wpi. WPI works fine run manually from the network share.