A bootable installer is one of the fastest ways to install a Mac. Rather than copy the installer to a local drive you can run it right off a USB disk (or Thunderbolt if you dare). Such a little USB drive would be similar to the sticks that came with the older MacBook Air, when we were all still sitting around wondering how you would ever install the OS on a computer with no optical media or Ethernet otherwise. Luckily, Apple loves us. To make a bootable USB/flash drive of High Sierra like the one that used to come with the MacBook Air, first name the USB drive. I’ll use hsinstall…
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Delete User Configurable nvram In High Sierra (10.13)
A nifty little feature of nvram is the ability to delete all of the firmware variables you’ve created. This can get helpful if you’ve got a bunch of things that you’ve done to a system and want to remove them all. If you run nvkram followed by a -p option you’ll see all of the configured firmware variables: nvram -p If you run it with a -d you’ll delete the given variables that you define (e.g. boot-args): nvram -d boot-args But, if you run the -c you’ll wipe them all: nvram -c
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Remotely and Silently Install A Windows MSI Via PowerShell
One of the easiest things to do in OS X is to remotely run an installation package using the installer command. You can do some similar tasks in Windows, although the commands aren’t quite as cut and dry. The Start-Process command can be used to kick off an executable. Here, we will kick off the msiexec.exe and feed it an argument, which is the msi file to install silently. We’ll then wait for it to complete: {Start-Process -FilePath "msiexec.exe" -ArgumentList "/i TEST.msi /qb" -Wait -Passthru}
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Receipts & Bills of Material in 10.8
When installing a package OS X makes a list of what it installs in /Library/Receipts/InstallHistory.plist. The dictionaries show each package installed, along with the installation date, the name displayed during installation, the version of the package being installed, the identifier of the package and the process name used to install the package. This information, along with the file name of the actual package is stored in corresponding property lists in /private/var/db/receipts. Each bill of material is also stored there, in .bom file. The lsbom command is used to see a list of objects installed by the package. You can also see the options such as the permissions assigned to files…
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Deploy Final Cut Pro Fast
One of the challenges that we face when building a large Xsan for video environments where we also need to deploy Final Cut is to install Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Studio on all the clients. It can mean a lot of switching out of optical media and kill productivity if you aren’t careful. This is why we started looking to the Xsan to provide some of the speed to the installation process that it will later provide to the clients. First off, extract the installers or create an image of the disk(s). If you extract the disk then you will need to mount it and then start the…
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What's a Metapackage?
A metapackage is a set of packages distributed in one structure. Each can have its own dependencies (including whether another package has successfully installed) and you can control which order packages run in.
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Mac OS X: Using the Command Line to Install a pkg
To use the command line to install a package, use the following command: installer -pkg ./<package name> -target/
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Positional Parameters and Packaging
When packaging it is worth note that Apple reserves some positional paremeters for your scripts. These are defined at http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/SoftwareDistribution/Install_Operations/Install_Operations.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/10000145i-CH14-SW1 They include: $1: Path to the package $2: Path to the destination. $3: Installation volume. $4: Root directory