Hi,

If you need an woring, tested automatic installtion for POV 3.5/Mega-POV you
can use the one here:
http://www.it-berater.org/smpov.htm for FREE.

You just drop it on any PC together with the "povray35.exe" and start it.
Everything else is done automatically by some busy WinRobots.

(Only for Windows PC's)

--Theo
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Distributed Network-Rendering or Local SMP-Rendering. With SMPOV and
POV-Ray 3.5. * Download free at: http://www.it-berater.org/smpov.htm

"Soeren Kuklau" <use### [at] chuckerrasdinet> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:20030717221931283+0200@news.povray.org...
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to create a Windows Installer package (.msi) for POV-Ray, so
> I can deploy it on 11 or more computers in a school, through Windows
> 2000 Server.
>
> As students are not supposed to have installation privileges, POV-Ray
> would be installed on a machine basis, not a user basis (i.e. it would
> be installed with admin / system privileges, but accessible from any
> user). Herein lies the problem: the pvengine.exe binary has problems
> recognizing the installaton path, which is apparently stored as per-user (
> HKCU) registry key, not a machine-wide (HKLM) one.
>
> I've found three different behaviours when trying to launch POV-Ray with
> a different user than the one it was installed with:
>
> A) it would complain about a missing "Home" key in the registry. That
> one, however, was created (by the installation program) in both HKCU _
> and_ HKLM (for whatever reason).
>
> Code bit:
>
> -----
>
>   getHome () ;
>   if (HomePath [0] == '\0')
>   {
>     MessageBox (NULL,
>                 "ERROR : Cannot find Home entry in registry.\n\n"
>                 "This entry should have been set by the installation
> program.\n\n"
>                 "If you did not install using the correct installation
> procedure, please "
>                 "do this before running POV-Ray for Windows.\n\n"
>                 "Otherwise, consult the README file that should have
> accompanied this executable file.",
>                 "Critical Error",
>                 MB_ICONSTOP) ;
>     return (1) ;
> }  }
>
> -----
>
> "getHome()" seems to look at "HKCU" first, and if that one fails, it'll
> try with "HKLM" instead. That's fine. I dunno why I ever received this
> error message then.
>
> B) it would complain about not being able to access its INI files. One
> would expect the program to try relative paths first, but it seems not.
>
> Relevant code:
>
> -----
>
>   if (stat (EngineIniFileName, &statbuf) != 0 || (statbuf.st_mode & S_
> IFREG) != 0)
>   {
>     if (debugFile)
>       fprintf (debugFile, "INI directory not found\n") ;
>     MessageBox (NULL,
>                 "ERROR : Cannot find INI directory in expected location\
> n\n"
>                 "This directory should have been created by the
> installation program.\n\n"
>                 "If you did not install using the correct installation
> procedure, please "
>                 "do this before running POV-Ray for Windows. Otherwise,
> consult the README.DOC "
>                 "file that should have accompanied this executable file.
> ",
>                 "Critical Error",
>                 MB_ICONSTOP) ;
>     return (1) ;
> }  }
>
> -----
>
> This error message mentions a "README.DOC" file, which doesn't exist;
> the "readme.txt" file consists mostly of information regarding the
> rendering engine.
>
> If the error message included the current "HomePath" var, that would
> ease debugging greatly. Maybe getHome() returned the wrong contents?
>
> [ C) it wouldn't launch at all, as in: it wouldn't react to it being
> launched. This may be a Windows XP bug, however. ]
>
> The process of creating the MSI package works by launching the "povwin35.
> exe" setup file with specified parameters, and watching it through a
> capturing tool. The parameters we're giving the setup are:
>
> 1. custom destination folder: "C:\Applications\Graphics\POV-Ray" (
> adhering to school-wide standards)
> 2. no backup folder (as this isn't an upgrade install)
> 3. custom shortcut folder: "Graphics\POV-Ray"
> 4. no update checking (as we manually check for new program versions for
> the whole network, then update the deployed packages)
>
> It would then ask to do a test render, which works fine. Then we remove
> all traces of the program, customize the created MSI package and run
> that one instead. Running POV-Ray as the same user again would work.
> Running it as a test user of one of the students, however, will give one
> of the three problems A / B / sometimes C.
>
> I suspect that even though the installer offers to install into a custom
> directory, the app does not truly support this, and still expects at
> least some of its files to reside in C:\Programs\POV-... - this, however,
> is bad application design (and not something I'd expect from this
> otherwise great program). As the source code is open
>
> I'm not familiar with C much, so I'm not sure if I can help fix this,
> but there is something wrong either with the Wise installer, or with
> what happens at pvengine.exe launch time.
>
> I'd appreciate any help.
>
> -- 

>
> <http://www.chucker.rasdi.net>

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