Installer brain-ache!

[Mr Jen Withers]

I have a software product that is basically a website and is about 400mb in size that needs to be installable from a CD and be able to run from the CD with no installation. This means putting all the website content onto the installer CD uncompressed in a convential file structure. Because it needs to be installable I also need to have an installer that will just copy all the content from the CD to a location on a hard-drive and do basic tasks such as setting up the start menu short cuts etc. Having the ability to uninstall would also be desirable. As far as I can tell, all the installer technologies ive looked at insist on compressing or dont make it clear if compression is mandatory. Can anybody suggest an installer technology or point me in the right direction? Ive tried writing something simple in VB6 to take care of this, but getting such things as progress bars to work in VB6 seems to be a challenge and I feel the time would better be spent learning a installer technology! Thanks Guys Mike

[Vasudevan Deepak Kumar]

Mr Jen Withers wrote:

if compression is mandatory

CPU horsepower is cheap and hence you can save media space right? I admit it is a debatable topic since media is also getting cheaper by the day. :-D

Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage Tech Gossips

[Mr Jen Withers]

oh course that is very correct and for installers compression is always good. But in this case I need to give the user the ability to launch the software from the CD as a webpage on the autorun, so it needs to be lose in a conventional file structure on the CD!

[Sebastian Schneider]

1. Use the installer-tool to setup all the paths, shortcuts, etc. Have it run a post-installation script which copies the files. -> Problem solved. 2. Depending on the content's structure, it might well have a compressed size of 200 MB or less. Since you only use 400 Megs right now, that is small enough to fit onto the CD AS WELL. Not the cleanest solution, but it solves your problem. You can always verify by installing the compressed version and then diffing against the data on the CD.