Hello everyone.

Ive put together a new automated GUI installer for Allegro. It also installs (if wanted) AllegroGL, AllegroFont and FBlend. I need you to test it.

All you need to do is double click the installer, select your wanted libs and then select your MinGW directory. It does the rest.

Get it here.

EDIT: Damn it. All I need is a place to upload this thing, dragoon is down. I will try again in the morning. But for now I am going to sleep...

You can get it here on my site

Yes, thank you for the webspace Baf.

Everyone start checking that stuff out!

Other than it uses nullsoft installer (which, anyway, is a personal preference), you did a good job .

Some suggestions:

Add shortcuts for the documentation.

You seemed to static link the grabber and demo executables. Dynamic link + upx everything (probably not the debug dll, since upx would remove all debug info) would reduce the package size.

And there's an alfont directory, but it's almost empty (only some docs) and the includes are not anywhere.

Add link to the official Allegro site, too.

noted. Will be in next version.

Huh? Please explain. Whats a upx? I didnt include all of the compiled examples because the download would shoot up to 30 megs .

Ooopsie forgot to include those. Will be in next version.

noted. Will be in next version.

Thanks for your input oscar.

Installamatator?

UPX = The Ultimate Packer for eXecutables

Will you be adding sound libraries?

You compiled the grabber and the demo program with the static version of allegro. Since you already have to include the dll, why not use it?

X-G already pointed what upx. Just note that it can be used with dll's, too.

OOooo.. I will have to take a look at this UPX stuff...

I was going to add FMOD for sound. HawkNL for networking. And one of our GUI packages for GUI, But then the whole installer got much larger. If enough of you think that the cost of the download size would be worthwhile (bloating the download to ~15-20 megs) then tell me and I will expand it to include them.

Regardless... This installer should make setting up quick workstations a breeze.

Net install?

InnoSetup, with one of its addons (ISTool), supports net install.

Or maybe two versions. A net' one and a local one. Gentoo style .

You know, most net installs can be turned into local ones by simply downloading all the packages but not actually installing any of them.

I haven't downloaded this myself (9megs? I already have allegro =P), but you should use the modern UI version of nsis. That one looks really slick (better than most, including inno).

NSIS also supports net install/webinstall but I haven't messed with it myself:

Marcello

I think he uses the new UI. I don't like it the either. [edit]it's not bad, there are just some minor things that I like more how InnoSetup does them [/edit]

I checked InnoSetup + ISTool net install and it sucks. You have to manually download each file. It's not package based.

Yup, it uses the modern UI.
NSIS does a better job then InnoSetup (its much easier). Ive tried both already.

Im feeling really hyper from all the easter chocolate. Maybe I should go run around a bit.

Gnatinator: i can host netinstall crap if you want to do net install... which i think is a very good idea

anyway, we can write our own installer for it :-D

lmao I misread. teh comment. any chance on fixing that quote tag, ml?

Marcello

Very good... very good.. I will contact you about that when I get a system going.

Yeah, I found NSIS script to be much more powerful.

Might I suggest you also include DUMB?

IMHO, ADime would be nice there too.

I'd have other suggestions, nut I can understand you don't want to bloat the package, so I leave it at this.

I wonder if installer could do some nice things like compiling examples during installation (in case it doesn't do it already, I haven't tried it yet). You'd have compiled examples and package wouldn't get bloated in this case.

The problem is that the user may not have the mingw variables and path set. This makes things more difficult for the installer.

Just have it check if they are set and if so, use them as default variables; else, ask for them.

Yeah, but the user won't like you set the variables globally. So you'll need to automatically generate a .bat file that sets the variables and does the compilation. Not sure if that can be done with nullsoft installer. You can write an external program that generates and executes these bat files.

I'll hazard a guess since I haven't use it extensively and say that you can. Shouldn't be too hard a task to accomplish at any rate.