lisacherie

So we’ve gone to a lot of effort to get CS5 working, for standard users. There are few users who have admin rights to their laptops, I get worried about updates to major applications like Adobe as sometimes things change or cause a problem in the environment we have. Adobe have this article on disabling updates – I chose to disable machine wide.

1. Users, especially those without admin accounts won’t be nagged about an update being available they can’t install anyway
2. I don’t need to worry about an update causing a problem

If you use the method in the article the check for updates option won’t even appear in the menus! Of course an update can still be installed manually, however without being notified that there are updates available, and no easy menu option to check for updates, I find majority of your users won’t go manually searching  unless there is something very specific they need. Hopefully they’ll talk to you first!

Note: I’m yet to have a go with the Adobe Software Update Server.. Does it work well for you?

CS5 Master Collection has taken a chunk of my time lately. AAMEE and I didn’t get along very well.. so here are the steps I took to get a working package together. This is to create the full master collection. You will need to be either using local user accounts or mobile accounts, as some of the apps do not work with a network home directory. I’ll post another write up soon, on the extra steps to make some of the apps work with network homes.

1. Don’t use the disks Adobe send you.. If you have a volume license, login and download the dmgs. These will likely be newer than your disks, and you won’t get prompted to keep changing disks, as you can mount them all at once. Nice! Make sure you also get the disks for Acrobat Professional you’ll need to install at the same time.
2. I use the Casper Suite, I like it, it does what I need. So I used the Composer app in v8 to make this package. I used a clean mac to create the package, all that was installed was our base OS image, I disabled MCX, and logged in as the administrator, taking a new and changed files snapshot using compose.
3. Once the snapshot was complete I opened the installer from the mounted dmg chose to install all the applications, entered the licensing details when prompted, then went for a beverage break.
4. On completion of the Master Collection installation, I installed Acrobat Professional, I learnt the hard way to get a working package, install them both at the same time, if you try to keep the packages separate, your licensing won’t hold.
5. Install any optional content that you would like from the other dmgs, I will admit I’m not very arty, I don’t know which optional content is needed, so I installed the whole lot, yes this makes it a big bloated installation, however it means it’s all there, and I won’t be asked later for optional installs, missing fonts, etc.
6. Open each of the applications, enter the administrator password if prompted, make sure every app works, and let it run any post install setup.
7. Check for updates, I chose to install all the available updates that were available at the time.
8. Open all of your applications again and make sure they still work.
9. Acrobat has a nasty habit of asking all users for an administrator password the first time the user launches the application. In education we don’t give out the administrator passwords, I edited the following files (thank you AFP548 for the tip) to prevent all the users being prompted for a password they don’t have. Edit the following files: AcroENUDist90SelfHeal.xml, AcroEFGPro90SelfHeal.xml, which are located in: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat, in each file do a find and replace YES becomes NO, REQUIRED also becomes NO. Be careful which text editor you use, as you don’t want to leave additonal characters behind.
10. Re-open Acrobat and Distiller to make sure the apps are still working.
11. Adobe help – after installation needed to download a number of help content files. I chose all, and downloaded all, then set to manage manually. Take note here, these files appear to be specific to each user account.
12. For sanity sake log in as a standard user and make sure all the apps work, and the user does not get prompted for admin passwords.
13. Let Composer take another snapshot – time for another beverage.
14. Composer should now show you a large list of all the files it has identified for the CS5/Acrobat installation. I like to trim this down, for example I don’t want various log files or preference files that were created. I also don’t want the files for the standard user.
15. For those familiar with Composer you will know that there is the option to fill user template when creating a dmg, you will end up with 2 GB of help files! So this will slow your first login time immensely, you may like to consider clearing out the files when building the package.
16. I chose to leave a number of the admin user’s preference files there, as I did not want the users to be prompted to participate in Adobe feedback, or prompted to register/create accounts. If you aren’t using composer you will need to manually place the files you want in the /System/Library/User Template/  folder.
17. You can now build your package, I like to use the dmg option, which lets me fill the user template and end user accounts if I select those options during deployment with the casper suite.
18. You should end up with a dmg file about 10 GB.

I hope this helps you Please comment if you have other suggestions to make a better CS5 package, or extra tips.