Hi-
Watchers of the list know I've had problems packaging CS4, as I'm sure a lot of us have. I can't wait for Casper 7 as our graphics department is upgrading to new machines and will have all new CS4 software very soon. Perhaps this is repetitive information, but I've solved my problems and I thought I'd share with a step-by-step, soup to nuts, process on getting it right.
Some background: Our situation is that we license Photoshop, Illustrator, Contribute and Premiere Pro - all CS4. We also license Acrobat Pro 9, but that packages separately and just fine. We license these as separate products with separate product keys - basically, they're standalone products, no bundles.
I used http://www.jamfsoftware.com/kb/article.php?id=196 as a base for my process. The issue was that on a few of the products, there was no "install-en_US.xml" file. On Contribute, there wasn't even a "deployment" folder. The trick was to run the Adobe installers with a command line flag so that it would generate the install.xml file which you could then drop into the Deployment folder. Here's the process, step by step:
- In Disk Utility, make a compressed DMG of your install media from which you can work from. If you need to gang multiple disks into one, do so as found at http://www.jamfsoftware.com/db/article.php?id=195 - I needed to do this for my Premiere Pro installation. Mount this disk image when you're done.
- Launch Terminal and type "sudo " - there's a space at the end of that sudo command.
- Go to your mounted disk image. We're going to follow a step I found in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Enterprise Manual Deployment Guide on page 2 (http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/openoptions/pdfs/manualenterprisedeployment_cs4_help.pdf). On the mounted disk image, go to the Setup executable, right-click and select Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/MacOS. In MacOS, drag Setup into the terminal window.
- In Terminal, add "--record=1" at the end of the command. You should end up with a command like this: sudo /Volumes/Adobe Contribute CS4/Adobe Contribute CS4/Setup.app/Contents/MacOS/Setup --record=1 Press Enter and the Setup will run - make sure there are two dashes before "record."
- In Setup, proceed as normal, don't worry about selecting the components to install as you'll handle this in Casper later. The setup will actually not install the product, but instead generate 2 files in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Installers: Adobe Creative Suite 4 <Product Name>.install.xml Adobe Creative Suite 4 <Product Name>.remove.xml
- Rename these to install.xml and uninstall.xml, respectively.
- Quit the installer and unmount the install media image.
- Go back to Disk Utility and convert your compressed DMG install media to read/write and then re-size the resulting image just a smidge larger. We want to add the xml files we just created now.
- Mount the expanded read/write disk image. Navigate to the "deployment" folder inside of the Adobe Installer. If there isn't a "deployment" folder (as I found was the case with Contribute CS4) create one. Copy the install.xml and uninstall.xml files into the deployment folder. Unmount the image.
- Back in Disk Utility, resize the image back down and convert back to compressed DMG. This resulting DMG file is what you'll add to Casper Admin and follow the normal method for a CS3 installation. When you create the Adobe installer, you'll be able to select what components to install. The only one I paired down was Premiere Pro as the full install was like 6 GB over the wire.
- Start on Page 181 of the Casper Suite 6.0 Documentation Guide at the bottom on the section entitled, "Adding the Adobe Installer DMG." Substitute the Adobe Install DVD DMG referenced with the DMG you created above in step 10.
Because these resulting compressed DMGs are recognized by Casper completely, all of the licensing remains intact when you install the different products. This was the major hurdle I needed to get over - I could package and distribute, but found that licensing was broken. This process seems to get around that and make it all work properly.
Hopefully someone will find this useful as for some reason it took me many hours to figure this out :)
j
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Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Infrastructure and Operations
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436