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Guide to setup AeroGlass in 14393 without installer


genecooper

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This is a guide to get bigmuscle’s Aeroglass pre-release 1.5 (www.glass8.eu) working for us noobies, dummies, whatever you want to call us, without the benefit of an installer in the Anniversary Update of Windows 10.  This guide is applicable only to 64-bit.  Eventually an installer will be available but for the time being this guide will give you the knowledge you need to get things working as early as possible.  Use of this guide is purely at your own risk, and I cannot be held responsible for any problems or harm to your system you may encounter as a result of using this guide, whether instructions are properly followed or not.  While every effort has been made to ensure that the guide will properly setup Aeroglass in the Anniversary Update, by using it you agree to accept complete responsibility for any problem or harm your system may suffer as a result.  Therefore, it is vital before beginning that you at a minimum create a restore point for Windows 10; however, it is highly preferable and strongly recommended that you have an image backup of your hard drive that can be restored before proceeding. 

Make a directory on your c: drive called c:\aeroglass. 

Download bigmuscle’s build #695 (Release Candidate, not #668—will not do), unzip all contents and put them in the Aeroglass folder. You can download this build from www.glass8.eu after logging in to your account (requires a donation).  The donation.key must be in the aeroglass folder if you want to get rid of the watermark and also to download the latest symbols.  By the way, when going onto bigmuscle’s site (www.glass8.eu) always use Firefox instead of IE.  IE won’t properly download things and lately I can’t even log into my account with IE (must use Firefox).

Download the aeroglass.xml file attached to this thread and put that file in your aeroglass folder.  Then run the following command at an administrative prompt and reboot:

schtasks.exe /Create /XML c:\aeroglass\aeroglass.xml /tn AeroGlass

You will get an incompatibility error that you can bypass.  Less than a minute later a box will pop up with your machine ID and ask if you want to copy it to the clipboard.  Say ‘yes.’  Then go to www.glass8.eu and make your donation under the Support tab if you haven't already done so.  You will get an e-mail from bigmuscle with a password to sign in to your user account.  Paste your machine ID from the clipboard and download your donation.key.  Copy your donation.key into the aeroglass folder.

At this point you can sign out and sign back in and your symbols should download in a debug console window (looks like a DOS box).  Close the window when it appears to have finished.  You may have to sign on and off several times before all your symbols finish downloading (mine worked with one try) or you may have to reboot your system one or more times to get this result.

Sign out and sign back in and at this point you should be done.  By default I believe you can use the Windows 8 theme provided by bigmuscle in the build but I’d recommend you download Noel’s ‘roundedcorners’ theme or the ‘rounded cornersnoextracolor’ theme on page one and two, respectively, of the main thread here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/175938-experimental-builds/?page=1. Just extract it and place both files your aeroglass and use the AeroGlassGUI utility to point to the correct theme in the Theme & Appearance tab, theme atlas image, of the utility.  Point to the .png file of the theme.  You can get this utility on bigmuscle’s website (www.glass8.eu) near the bottom of the download tab called ‘Testing version of GUI application to modify Aeroglass parameters.’  Again, use Firefox to download this—IE won’t do it.  Put the utility in the aeroglass folder as well.

If things aren’t working out at this point all you have to do to completely reverse everything you’ve done is go to Windows Administrative Tools-->Task Scheduler-->Task Scheduler Library and delete the Aeroglass task.  You should be back to where you started after a reboot.

You will probably want to make the title bars more transparent than they are by default.  The GUI utility just mentioned will allow you to change your theme or appearance (theme or amount or lack of blur) under the 'Theme  & Appearance' tab but it does not work for transparency or other adjustments in the anniversary update under the 'Glass Colors' tab (glass color and inactive frames) like it did in threshold2, so you have to do this with registry settings.  To do that copy the following into Notepad and save it as ‘aero.reg’ and then run it.  This will put the proper entries into the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
	 
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM]
"AccentColor"=dword:c41f1f1f
"EnableBlurBlend"=dword:00000000
"GlassOpacity"=dword:00000000
"AccentColorInactive"=dword:c41f1f1f

In regedit go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\DWM and set GlassOpacity to a low number.  The lower it is the more transparency you will have (I set mine to ‘0’).  You can also do color adjustments but honestly this is something I’m still working on.  If you use the ‘roundcorners’ theme mentioned above you should get pleasing colors like those shown below.  You have to sign out and sign back in again to see the changes you have made.

Good luck and put any questions as comments in this thread.  I’ll do what I can to help.

aeroglass.xml

desktop.jpg

Edited by genecooper
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You can download files from Big Muscle's www.glass8.eu site with Internet Explorer IF you do NOT left-click the link, but instead do exactly the following:

1.  Right-click the link to get the context menu.

2.  Save Target As, change the extension to .7z, and save the file to your disk.

3.  Once the file is completely downloaded to your disk, open it with 7Zip.

-Noel

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6 hours ago, NoelC said:

You can download files from Big Muscle's www.glass8.eu site with Internet Explorer IF you do NOT left-click the link, but instead do exactly the following:

1.  Right-click the link to get the context menu.

2.  Save Target As, change the extension to .7z, and save the file to your disk.

3.  Once the file is completely downloaded to your disk, open it with 7Zip.

-Noel

I had typed all of the above also yesterday, clicked submit but suddenly the thread had disappeared, now it's back??

Anyhow I also commented on your instructions Genecooper, nice work. I'm sure this thread will be quite helpful to a lot of folk.

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What message to you get when you ran it?  Did you reboot afterwards?  Did you have the aeroglass.xml file in the c:\aeroglass directory?  I re-ran it (by copy and paste) and here's what I got:  Are you running Windows 10.14393?

schedule.jpg

Edited by genecooper
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10 hours ago, JorgeA said:

Not to go OT, but -- Noel, by what thought process did you discover the part about changing the extension to .7z? That's pretty amazing. How would anyone even think to do that?

compwiz__19482.1376531698.190.250.jpg

In all seriousness, I still show the IE status bar.  When I hover over a link, in the status bar appears the URL.  Some of the links show a URL which ends with .7z, so clearly the file is meant to be downloaded and opened as a file with a .7z extension, which I know from experience to be a compressed archive openable by the 7Zip file manager.

The root cause of the problem, why the right thing doesn't happen automatically (based on my own experience with web hosting and browsing) is that the mime type isn't being provided correctly by Big Muscle's web site.  That's metadata that comes along with the download.  He can probably fix it by including something like the following line in an .htaccess file at the root of his web site:

AddType application/octet-stream .7z

-Noel

Edited by NoelC
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Note: As of October 05 2016 Big muscle released installer version 1.5 (  found on home page download tab ) for win 10 1607 - 10.0.14393. Hence there are no longer any experimental versions to try to install. This will be my last edit for this post as of Oct 06 2016.

For those who already have aeroglass installed with donation key pre win 1607 - 10.0.14393 I did the following to setup. (64 Bit)

1. Disable Aeroglass in Task Scheduler.

2. Proceed with 14393 update.

3. Once updated copy files from (release canidate 695 available only through login account for donors) and overwrite the same files in your c:\aeroglass directory.

4. Delete c:\aeroglass\symbols directory.

5. Re-enable Aeroglass in Task Scheduler.

6. Restart Windows 14393...symbols will download and symbols directory is self created by program where the symbols are placed.

7. See 7.1 Also. Tweak the registry as described in multiple threads since only the Themes and appearance page of GUI is functional as yet for 14393. You may have to add "GlassOpacity"=dword:00000000 and "EnableBlurBlend"=dword:00000000 if not present.
You have to sign out and sign back in again or restart for changes to take affect.

7.1 Update 10-02-2016. A new GUI has been uploaded by Bigmuscle 10-02-2016  For Win 1607 14393+  It includes a new accent tab which worked OK for me. It has not been thoroughly tested yet.  Simply replace existing AeroGlassGUI.exe and sign out and in or restart.

8. Update roundedcorners layout http://noel.prodigitalsoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/14393/RoundedCorners.zip

WTT Rounde Corners  noextracolor 695.jpg

Edited by Alanrh
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Maybe a little off-topic but I had a lot of trouble upgrading from 10.10586 to the Anniversary Update with aeroglass running--couldn't really use the desktop.  After I recovered my 10586 backup I uninstalled aeroglass, tried the update again, and it went fine.  I'm sure deleting the aeroglass task and then rebooting would have the same effect.  So in general when people do major version upgrades (like the next one to rs2) it's probably best to not have aeroglass running to avoid problems.  Apparently the cause was of course that what I was running on 10586 was not compatible with the Anniversary Update.

Edited by genecooper
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Thanks for the guide, much appreciated! :) 
I did not use your XML. Still using my old donator key with the old machine code, no problems.
The part for the registry editing was very helpful to get rid of the blue tint.
Just enabled the scheduled task again which I had disabled before doing the anniversary update, symbols loaded and glass was back. Easy enough with the guide. :)

Win10 just looks so much better to me with glass.
Bigmuscle and the people here are my heroes for fixing Microsofts lack of visual taste.
They got the look right one time with Vista/7, at last a unique and wideley loved windows GUI, but hey, lets drop that and make everything flat and boring and harder to use.
We do not want to be confused with Apple for our good looking OS...
I will never understand them. :wacko:

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I'm glad the guide helped you.  I'm beginning to think that Alanrh's and your approach might be the way to go but you should also probably replace the files in the aeroglass folder files with the new ones if you haven't already.  Knowing me I'll probably always start from scratch just to be compulsive!  Certainly disabling the aeroglass task is essential when upgrading to a new build as I alluded to earlier.  Yeah, Microsoft sucks.  The thing that really blows my mind is how they did that survey asking everyone what they wanted most in Windows 10 prior to its release and of course the number one response was 'bring back aeroglass.'

Edited by genecooper
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