Installers

Features Ptolemy II needs

List of installers

Free Installers

izPack
velocityreviews.com says:
The IzPack native launcher will first check for a JRE on the target system. If one is found, then it will launch the installer. If no JRE can be found, then it will help the user in installing one either from the internet or from a bundled one. To sum-up, the IzPack native launcher will allow your users to install your software even if they don't have a JRE at first sight.
The IzPack native launcher is a .exe file that looks for a file called launcher.ini in the current directory. The launcher.ini specifies:
  • which jar file contains the IzPack installer.
  • The setup .exe or script to run to install the JRE.
    Unfortunately, this does not meet our needs, since we want to use a custom JRE that includes packages like Java3D etc. For us to use this, we would need to create a JRE setup script.
Notes about IzPack Launcher and possible alternatives
launch4j
Can include a JRE, but really only for one application? We need to add multiple apps to the Start Menu.

Commercial installers

Ptolemy installers

To install Ptolemy under Windows, we require an optional custom JRE.

The way we do this is based on Notes about IzPack Launcher and possible alternatives.

  1. We create an izPack installer that installs Ptolemy II
  2. We use launch4j to invoke the izPack installer. The launch4j installer includes an optional JRE.
  1. Create a jre that has JAI, Java 3D, Joystick JMF, JavaComm, X10 etc. in it. See Optional packages not shipped with Ptolemy used at runtime
  2. Copy this jre to $PTII/adm/gen-X.Y/jre

IzPack notes

Things I wish were different

These notes are for IzPack 3.9.0-M1, from September 9, 2006.