Building a Mac OS X image without the Finder... So It Just Runs Casper Imaging...

[tu-egadsby]

Dear Friends,

Good morning. I am in the process of making a 10.8 image use with Casper Imaging. I am looking to create an image that only show’s Casper Imaging and not the rest of the Finder. What I am looking to emulate is the user experience that the Deploy Studio Netboot Set gives. Has anybody “removed” or suppressed the Finder in this way? If so how did you go about doing it?

[nessts]

you could use parental controls and simple finder that has an allowed set of apps.

[tu-egadsby]

That's an idea, I'll have to see how well that works... I wonder how the DS folks do it.

[cstout · Accepted solution]

Hi Eric,

What worked for me is installing the OS and then modifying the dock delay and disabling the Finder plist.

For the dock delay, I used a command similar to this with a long number added to the delay:

defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 1000 && killall Dock

The line above sets the dock at a delay of 1000 seconds before showing. The reason I chose to do this instead of disabling the dock plist is because applications (Casper Imaging) would not launch without the dock plist left alone.

To have Casper Imaging launch at startup, I enabled auto-login and added Casper Imaging to the login items for that user.

For disabling Finder, once I was satisfied with my image, I booted the computer into target disk mode and plugged it into my main workstation.

The file is located at: Macintosh HDSystemLibraryLaunch Agentscom.apple.Finder.plist

Simply rename the extension to ".disabled" and make sure that the new extension replaces ".plist" instead of appending ".plist.disabled" because that would still make it a .plist ending in ".plist.disabled.plist" and nobody needs that madness in their lives.

It's early and I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet, so if you find that something appears to be missing, I'd be happy to return to this after cup number three. I hope this helps!

[tu-egadsby]

Thanks, I'll try it…

[donmontalvo]

Have you looked at:

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/viewProduct.html?id=13&view=info

[bajones]

@donmontalvo Will this tool work with OS 10.7-10.9 images and Casper Suite v9? Looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.

[donmontalvo]

@bajones We used it at my last gig, since then we've been using DeployStudio so haven't had the need. If it doesn't work now JAMF might want to update it or pull it. Reaching out to our JAMF rep now, will post their response.

FWIW...

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=9720

[tu-egadsby]

I tried Christopher's method and it worked very well from a USB 3 flash drive. We can't use Netboot widely in our enterprise because of some security concerns. The drive booted to Casper Imaging in a little over a minute. Great!

Only one thing worth mentioning the method only fully works if you go into System Preferences and set the Dock to autohide otherwise the "defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 1000 && killall Dock" doesn't work.

Thanks again for all the help!

[chris_kemp]

I wonder - how hard would it be to set up a "Restore" partition with Casper Imaging to accomplish this? I'm facing impending netboot issues here as well...would be good to have an alternative.

[damienbarrett]

I thought about trying to modify the existing Restore partition to include Casper Imaging but abandoned the idea when I realized that any OS update would overwrite the modified Restore partition. I suppose you could partition your HD to have *another* Restore Partition alongside the Apple one. I played around with this idea too but rejected it because I couldn't get my image small enough to be usable in a wide rollout. I do still have some custom "Tools" bootable partitions that live on my utilities drives and my Thunderbolt Casper Imaging HDs, so I have unified all my tools into a single Thunderbolt SSD drive.

[scottb]

@damienbarrett: I don't believe that's true of dot system updates. If you look at a Mac that's had a bunch of those - say 10.8.2, 10.8.3. 10.8.4, etc you will most likely see the RP the same as the original build version. I don't think Apple updates the RP on those types of updates often, and only when I use a full installer do I see the RP updated as well. At least that's what I think to be true.
But changing the RP in general is probably not a great idea...

[acdesigntech]

I thought there was a limitation of the retore partition where it did not have all the frameworks necessary to run a lot of different types of gui tools... or is that not the case anymore? I'd actually love to give my techs a 2 GB thumb drive instead of maintaining a netboot imaging environment worldwide. While not hard, it is starting to become unwieldy..