Difference between revisions of "Adobe CS4"

Revision as of 10:26, 13 May 2009

Silent installer for Adobe CS4.

This is one of the worst installers I've ever seen - over-engineered, with dis-informative explanations of exit codes giving no clues whatsoever.

First, navigate to Deployment Toolkit\Adobe CS4 directory and start Setup.exe. It will ask you where Adobe CS4 installer is located - point it to disk1\Adobe CS4 directory.

Answer any questions it might have, give your serial number - the program will produce Adobe CS4 directory with 4 files - copy it somewhere to your deployment directory (i.e. to %SOFTWARE%\adobecs4) - this will be your silent installer:

• AdobeUberInstaller.exe
• AdobeUberUninstaller.exe
• AdobeUberInstaller.xml
• AdobeUberUninstaller.xml

If your installation media came on 4 DVDs, you may feel unlucky. Some Adobe genius couldn't predict that most corporate deployments happen over network. So if you copy contents of these DVDs somewhere to a network location, run Deployment Toolkit to create a silent installer, it will not work. Apparently, after installing programs from disk 1, silent installer will want to access disk 2. As it is a silent installer, it can't ask you to place a correct disk and will fail with a meaningless exit code, like:

• Exit code: 6 Silent workflow completed with errors
• Exit code: 7 Unable to complete the silent workflow

Who made an silent installer which will want to access different DVDs is beyond my understanding.

A workaround is to create a Adobe CS4 directory and copy payloads and extensions directories from all DVDs there (if there are files that already exist, just overwrite them - some content is duplicated among DVDs), i.e. like that:

• Adobe CS4\payloads
• Adobe CS4\extensions

Next, run the installer like this (cs4-install.bat):

net use P: \\server\dfs\Admin\CS4
"P:\Adobe CS4 installer\AdobeUberInstaller.exe"
net use /delete P:
echo

Even with this, it may not work - depending on workstation's security settings, you may expect a pop-up Window asking "are you sure you want to run AdobeAir.exe" etc. It may also not work if your PCs have less than 1 GB memory. It doesn't fail immediately - Adobe's state-of-the-art installer needs 8 minutes, heavy disk and network IO to detect that the PC it runs on has less than 1 GB RAM...

Don't get too excited if you finally manage to install it - most likely, CS4 programs will work correctly for user with Administrator rights. Normal users may not be that lucky - Photoshop, Dreamweaver will crash before starting, like most of other programs when not started as Administrator.

Note that CS4 is a lot of software and the whole installation process may take 1-2 hours to complete, so increasing the timeout for installation (to 7200; default is 3600 seconds) may be a good idea.

<package id="adobecs4"
  name="Adobe CS4"
  revision="1"
  reboot="false"
  priority="0">

  <check type="file" condition="exists" path="%PROGRAMFILES%\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Photoshop.exe" />
  <check type="file" condition="exists" path="%PROGRAMFILES%\Adobe\Adobe Dreamweaver CS4\Dreamweaver.exe" />
  <check type="file" condition="exists" path="%PROGRAMFILES%\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CS4\InDesign.exe" />

  <install cmd='"%SOFTWARE%\adobecs4\cs4-install.bat"' timeout="7200" />
  <upgrade cmd='"%SOFTWARE%\adobecs4\cs4-install.bat"' timeout="7200" />
  <remove cmd='"%SOFTWARE%\adobecs4\cs4-uninstall.bat"' />
</package>