In this lesson, I want to talk about installing applications and really going to point out a couple
of cool features with regards to installing applications of Apple remote desktop and then also point
out one limitation.
So I'm going to go ahead and get started here.
Minimize this.
Let me show you what I have on my desktop.
We're going to actually install three different applications.
We're going to install Wacom tablet drivers.
If you're not familiar with Wacom tablets, they're drawing tablets that are used in art and design
an awful lot, as well as touch screens.
The Dobe flash player, which everyone should be familiar with that application, and then open AMMU,
which is a emulator for playing classic video games.
So when we talk about each of these individually, before I get into Apple remote desktop, the first
thing I want to point out, Open Ammu is actually an entirely self-contained application.
And we've seen this a lot in the West.
And a lot of the applications, especially the ones that are built into Mac OS, are self-contained.
And those are the ones where you can do show package contents, as we looked at before.
And you can see all the supporting files are really contained within the application itself.
Second is, we go ahead and mount these drives.
So do both of these.
Second up is the welcome to have a driver, this is actually a pkg file, so that's a particular type
of installer package.
That's basically when you package an application for Mac OS, the default Mac OS installer accepts and
reads and then uses the file format to install applications.
And these are typically applications that may have they're not self-contained.
They do have supporting resources that maybe get installed across different areas of the hard drive.
And then flash player itself is actually an application, and this is the most difficult one to deal
with, with Apple and what desktop basically out of the box because it doesn't support installing an
application, requires some amount of interactivity on the other side of the client.
But we can actually show you how you can do this in an interactive way remotely.
So we'll start with you.
Jump back into HD here.
So we've got my MacBook Pro here, and we'll start with the most simplest install, and that's going
to be the copy.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit the plus here.
And I'm going to find my.
File on my desktop, open MUE.
Choose that and then and that's what to do with it, and you can place them in different, different
things.
I'm going to choose applications, folders.
They have few of these that are a pre-built that are most common.
So I'm going to do applications folder.
And if the item already exists, what I want to do, I'm just going to say replace it if it exists.
And I want to inherit the the permissions from the folder that it's in.
So it's going to have the same permissions as the applications folder, which is the default.
I'm not doing this on more than one machine, but if I wanted to, I could have if there's an issue
on one machine, I can have it stop copying on.
All machines are going to have to continue to do it.
This case is just one machine, so I don't care.
And then after opening, whether I want to open the items or not, I'm actually going to say no security,
encrypt the data network.
I'm going to leave that on.
But you may want to turn that off if you've got a really large file to copy, because it does slow down
the file copy.
And if there's not anything, you know, sensitive or that needs to be secured or encrypted in the file
that you're copying, you may choose to turn that off and then you can also limit your network usage.
I'm not going to do that here.
But if you've got a large application and or large file that you need to copy, you may want to do that
so that it doesn't flood your network with data and cause issues with the network performance.
So anyway, I got that all set.
I can certainly schedule this for a later time as well as we've seen before, but I'm going to go ahead
and just do it.
And so I'm just going to say copy and.
So when I hit copy, it's going to go ahead and start.
And it's completed.
So.
Here's my copy.
We go out and control my machine, make sure it actually worked.
All right, we told to install in the applications folder and cruise through here, and sure enough,
there it is, there's our application so that we essentially install it would be the same as dragging
and dropping it into the applications folder once I downloaded it.
But I can now do this.
The power here is I can leverage that same copy job on multiple machines at once.
So the amount of time it took me to do that on one computer, I could do it on hundreds or thousands.
All right, next, we're going to go ahead and talk about the instant installations of pkg files, so
same deal, I'm going to select my machine this time.
I'm actually going to choose, install, not copy.
And it's going to ask me for a specific pkg file I'm going to hit plus to that.
And notice I've got these DMG files, so that doesn't work because I can't actually copy those.
But the file was actually inside that DMG, so I actually need to find that.
Here's my mounted drive, the DMG file out of that virtual disk and here's my Wacom tablet file.
So I'm to choose that.
And because I'm doing install, I have various other options so I can do a restart or not, I'm going
to choose not to restart.
Now, you may have an application, and I'll tell you the way home driver is one where it does actually
require a restart before the user can actually use the driver.
But we're going to go ahead and say don't restart for now.
We'll schedule that at a later date.
You can choose where you want to run this from.
If you have a remote test server, you can actually do that.
I'm going to choose this application because I'm only this is a very small install, only really worried
about it for this this one machine.
But if I was doing this across multiple machines and I want to do other stuff in Apple remote desktop,
I may actually want to choose test server that allows it to copy it in the background while I do other
things.
And then we still have our same questions about encryption stuff.
I'm actually going to uncheck the encrypt network data this time and I'm going to change that back to
this application again.
We can schedule it if we wanted to, but instead I'm going to do the install immediately.
Now I can look at my act tasks and you'll see here is the copy job.
So first it's copying it, the file over and then it's going to execute the file because it can execute
the file with the default install.
It'll run the installer unattended.
So as you can see here, installing.
Expand this out for a test status as well here.
So you can kind of see what's happening.
Registering, added, component's.
So we've got some installation work happening, so not a lot of feedback, but it does give you some.
And we're 100 percent complete and we see that it has succeeded, so I can always, again, remote control
that.
And we'll find out here if.
Wacom tablet is installed there it is.
So that was successful and again, we can leverage multiple machines to do this, really cut down on
some time.
OK, the last one we're going to talk about is one that's a little bit more difficult, and that's when
you're trying to install an application from an application.
So Adobe Flash Player, for example, is an application actually runs on the machine.
And it's custom it doesn't use the default installer that a file would and it's not self-contained.
So I can't just easily copy it into the applications folder and have it actually install.
So we're going to talk a little bit about scripted installs and using UNIX commands later in the course,
because that's really more of an advanced feature of remote desktop.
But we're just dealing with the basics.
There is one way around this.
It's not particularly elegant.
It is still time consuming, but it does get the job done.
It's still a little bit faster than having to walk around and hand download it on each machine.
So this does give you a little bit of a shortcut, but it is in no way really an automated feature or
nearly as slick as installing a CG.
But here's what we're going to do.
We're going to go ahead and do a copy and we're going to hit plus.
And basically what we do is I'm going to find the mounted DMG file for Flash Player.
So my there's my modded virtual disk and I'm going to find the install Adobe Flash Player application
and see it's an application here that I hit to that.
And where does it where do I want it to place?
Well, right now it defaults to current user's desktop folder, and that's OK, because I'd have to
launch it off the desktop and then I'd have to actually delete it and then I have to empty the trash.
So it does create a little bit of extra mess for me to kind of clean up.
So there's a little bit more elegant way of doing that.
I'm going to go ahead and instead specify the temp folder.
And if it's not in your list, you can just do a specified full path and just do a temp.
So if you remember, that's the temp folder in one of the hidden folders inside macros.
So if it already exists, I'm going to just say replace it.
I don't really care about ownership.
And here's one of the key thing here is, is that after copying, go ahead and open.
So I'm going to say after copying open and I'm going to not encrypt this one either, and I'm going
to go ahead and copy.
And you can see it's the start doing the copy here.
So it succeeded.
So what's happened, has it installed?
Well, let's remote into the machine and find out what is what's happening on the client.
So let's go ahead and do a control.
No, it actually hasn't, but what it has done is it has copied the flash player installer to the temp
directory and it's launched the installer.
So I still have to do some things interactively on each of my machines, but I can very quickly go through
the process of doing this.
And now I can go ahead and finish the install that way, and when it's done installing, it's already
in the the the Templer, so it's going to go ahead and eventually delete it on a future reboot.
So not nearly as slick, a little bit more time consuming, but still better than the alternative of
having to run around to do sneaker net or download these individually on each machine.
So those are the three different ways that you can basically install packages using remote desktop,
whether that's pkg files, a copy of an application or a copy to the temp directory and watching it
and then interactively finishing the install.