I am looking at options on how to make a multi-platform Java application run on system startup. There are obviously ways to do it manually for any application (e.g., "How to Make a Program Run at Startup on Any Computer"). Unfortunately, they are all different and depend on the operating system version and Linux distribution. I need to support at least:
Windows >= 7
macOS >= 10.12
Ubuntu >= 16.04
Raspbian >= 8
It would be awesome if Install4j already has a way to achieve this.
There is a "Add a startup executable on Windows and macOS" action in install4j.
On Linux/Unix there is no general solution for this problem, so you have to do it yourself for the particular environments that you want to support.
Related
I just started using pyGears and I find it easier working on Windows. I was wondering is it possible to run it on Windows or it's only Linux based?
It can maybe be run on Windows but I wouldn't count on it for now. PyGears is natively supporting Linux (Ubuntu) so if you have a choice I would advise switching to Ubuntu.
There is a future plan for supporting PyGears for Windows in a full manner, but at the moment that's not the priority.
I have created an application in C# that relies on a specific driver (a custom virtual hid driver based on VMulti).
Currently, I have everything working and I want to combine both the application and driver into one installation package. As of right now, my application part has a .exe file and a .dll file. My driver has an .inf and .sys file, hidkmdf.sys, and WdfCoInstaller01009.dll (this dll is from the WDK). I am not able to install the driver through the traditional method of right-clicking the inf and clicking install. Instead, I use devcon to install it (command is "install inffile.inf hardwareid")
I tried using InstallShield LE, but I am only able to install the application, not the driver. After doing some searching, I found people using DIFxAPP to create the installation framework for drivers, however, I am not sure if this can be integrated into InstallShield so that the driver is installed during the application installation process.
So my main question is: What is the best and simplest method for combining application and driver installation into one package (meaning the setup.exe will install both the driver and the application)?
I am very new to driver development and application deployment, so any suggestions are welcome.
Thank You
EDIT: It is preferred that the solution does not require any paid tools.
Acctually, exists a many ways to implement this which depends on your Windows Installers skills.
You didn't specify target OSes for your application, that's why can I give you some ways:
PnpUtil.exe internal Windows 7 utility (only for Windows 7)
DPInst.exe included to WDK
DifXAPI merge module.
You can install drivers with help of all these utils via Custom Actions.
NOTE: That your driver SHOULD BE signed, otherwise you will receive error during silent installation.
I am required to create a simple application. Since I am good at WPF and I don't know win forms that good I implemented my application by creating a .Net Framework 4.0 WPF project in Visual Studio. Everything works great the application runs like it is supposed to.
Since the application is required to run in multiple platforms (Windows XP and above) I am including the prerequisites when publishing my applications. The prerequisites happen to be:
1) WIC (Windows Imaging Component) old computers need that to run the .net framework 4.0
2) Windows installer 3.1 (needed in order to install the next prerequisite)
3) Windows .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile
If I install those prerequisites then the application runs like it is supposed to.
Now the problem is:
My boss did not approve my application because he tried installing it in a Windows XP machine with SP2 and this are the things that happened:
Step 1)
// first prerequisite (WIC) took less than 1 minute to install everything
// is working great so far.
Step 2)
// second prerequisite (Windows Installer 3.1) takes about 2 minutes to install
// which is great. After the installation is done the computer needs to be
// restarted in order to continue with the installation. Things are not going
// that good now but we are still ok...
Step 3)
// After the computer is done rebooting it continues with the last prerequisite
// (Windows .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile). That takes 10 minutes to install!!!!
Step 4)
// My application has all the prerequisites needed to be installed so it installs in
// about 1 minute
We recorded the time, and the application took about 25 minutes to install from start to finish. The computer where we tested the installation was a virtual computer using 2 cores and 1 GB of memory with 3.1 GHZ.
What do you guys recommend in order to speed up this installation? Should I use a different technology such as windows forms using .net 2.0? It will be nice if I can deploy the application that I have already created. If you guys could help me make this application portable I will really appreciate it. In order to do so I tried building my application with all the required references copied to the output directory. That did not work... Or any ideas of how to make the installation be faster will be of great help as well.
If you're using .NET Framework 4.0 (which is not going to come out-of-the-box with any versions of Windows, especially Windows XP) there's no way to get around the install of .NET 4.0 on the target machine. Your major bottleneck is going to be the download of .NET 4.0 files from Microsoft to the machine.
I've run into similar problems where the initial install of an application takes forever because of the .NET 4.0 download and install. We even encountered an issue where the application couldn't be install because there was insufficient disk space for the download.
One option would be to pre-push the prereqs out to all the machines you'll be install this on before deploying your application.
Otherwise, you might be forced to use an older version of the .NET framework. Here's a list of the framework versions which shipped with various versions of windows.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2007/03/14/mailbag-what-version-of-the-net-framework-is-included-in-what-version-of-the-os.aspx
Unfortunately, if your organization is committed to using a 10 year old operating system then they either need to accept that modern tools will require a lengthy install process while all prereqs are loaded... or else force you to use a 10 year old software technolgy.
is there any gui tools like gnome system monitor in solaris for monitoring processes? or is it possible to get the gnome system monitor binary pkg for solaris os ?
You don't specify which version of Solaris - recent ones include gnome-system-monitor already.
Additional gnome software for older Solaris versions may be available from various projects that make open source software packages available for Solaris, such as SunFreeware, Blastwave, and OpenCSW
The CDE desktop included in Solaris 2.6 through Solaris 10 also includes a couple of simpler process monitoring tools - sdtprocess and sdtperfmeter.
If you dont mind me asking what is the need for a gui?
the command top will give you everything you need but in a terminal?!?
anyway /usr/dt/bin/sdtperfmeter is on older releases but this WONT give you processes
gnome-system-monitor should be installed on newer releases, and this WILL give you processes.
If the gnome-system-monitor command doesn't work top will.
How about GKrellm? That is popular under the Gnome suite running on Linux.
I'm sketching an application deployment process for a bunch of relatively complex desktop applications. We have both native and Java apps, so the deployment must be able to check for existence of the JRE and install it if needed. Some of the apps depend on special hardware, so the deployment must also be able to launch the necessary driver installers. Some of the apps are multiplatform, and preferably the same mechanism should be able to create Windows, Linux and Mac OS X installers. That is:
The installer must be able to install, in addition to the application itself:
Java Runtime Environment.
Drivers (hardware) - that is, launch other installers.
The installer builder must be operable from the command line so that it can be integrated with an automatic build mechanism that generates installer packages for each platform as nightly builds.
In addition, I need to create "update from the web" mechanisms for the applications. It could be included in the installer, or it could also be a separate custom mechanism built into the application.
Now, this is getting a bit complex, and I suspect that there might be no single installer that could do this all. Therefore I'm thinking between two fundamentally different approaches:
Platform-specific mechanisms: NSIS would create .exe or .msi for Windows, XXX would create .deb for Ubuntu, and YYY would create .dmg for OS X.
Cross-platform installer that would handle all the requirements above: ZZZ?
Any recommendations? Some options that I've looked include:
NSIS - Excellent, but Windows only.
IzPack - Good, but requires JVM to run.
Is there an universal tool for this, or should I just pick an appropriate tool separately for each platform? In the latter case, what would be "NSIS equivalents" for Ubuntu and Mac OS X?
I have some recommendations as follows.
Use WIX (Windows Installer XML) for creating MSI installers for Windows
Use Package Maker (part of XCode tools) on MAC OS X, preferably the command line version
Write wrapper scripts (in Python or so) to drive the over-all installer creation process.
to aggregate all the components you need to install (may be from ur version control system)
generate necessary files for Wix and Package Maker as much as possible
to run the packaging tool and generate the package
Make sure that the overall installer creation process is a simple one command operation overall (with options to create different versions of your package based on criteria like release branch etc.)
Overall, developing this workflow requires some initial effort and quite a lot of thinking. But the end result is quite worth the effort.
I haven't done this on the Linux side, but I guess would use RPM/DEB on that front in this workflow.
BitRock InstallBuilder meets all the requirements, including being multiplatform and providing an autoupdate mechanism
You should take a look at InstallJammer. It will definitely handle the cross-platform elements that you want and can even add entries to the DEB and RPM databases on the target system during installation. OS X support is still experimental, but it mostly works.