making my own installer

[maniaq]

hey, i'm about to make my own installer, what prgrams do yu prefer to use making a installer, i want very simple, fast and compactible.maybe there are some guides to help out.tnx in advance

p.s. i found program name installshield wizard - is this the program i should use?

[Scubar]

well a very simple and free one to use is Inno Setup you can build msi packages with it and it has very good compression ratio compared to the others ive used.

if u want to pay for one then theres Astrum InstallWizard 2 which is very easy to use and u can completely customize the dialogs u see when installing, but unfortunately u cant use any decent setup icons which really sucks.

and for more advanced usage theres things like Installshield X Professional, Wise Installer or Ghost Installation Wizard. but youd be looking at forking out alot of cash for them.

Edited July 22, 2005 by ScubaSteve

[maniaq]

tnx

[digitalfrost]

You should try NSIS, it is very easy and once you have a basic layout making new installers is a breeze.

I offer some NSIS Scripts on my homepage (see signature). I don't like INNO Setup because by default the installdir can only be set absolute and not relative (see here for a workaround).

Edited July 22, 2005 by digitalfrost

[maniaq]

i have a question....how could i retrive information of an installer: for egzample i have sound blaster live 24bit soft, and i want to create a administrave point? how could i do it? it this possible? maybe there is another way to find out which files are used, because there are many unneeded files in the installer, and how about the registrys how could i found them all for some kind of program.tnx

maybe there are some special sites that answers my question,tnx

[evilvoice]

Unless there exists 2 different inno setups in the world, then both digitalfrost and ScubaSteve are wrong. for one, inno setup builds exe, not msi. and digitalfrost your idea that inno uses absolute paths is soooo wrong. Take a look at the help file, there exists stuff like {pf} for programfiles dir, {sys} for system32, {win} for windows, {dao} for data access objects dir (dunno the exact name, but its in there somewhere)...seriously, you should look at the help file.

[Scubar]

Inno Setup may well build exe i cant remember. but i thought it was msi installers. i havent used it in a while as i primarly use Astrum and Installshield