Fledermaus Silent Install

Since the release of Fledermaus 7.7.1 silent install is supported with MSI installs.

 

Depending on your organization's group policies with UAC, this may or may not work, and can be used as a guideline. The process detailed below assumes that you have access to run the command prompt as an administrator on the target hardware.

We do use Advance Installer (http://www.advancedinstaller.com/) to create the MSI and the .exe wrapper. Further msiexec documentation can be found on their site;

Silent Install - Step-by-step guide

1. Place the Fledermaus installation file at an accessible location.
   1. Open a Command Prompt as an Admin user;
      1. Depending on the version of Windows that you are running, the Command Prompt can be found by using the Start Menu search functionality or the Start Menu Run... command. Make sure that you are running a Command Prompt with elevated privileges or the installer will prompt you to verify that you want to execute portions of the install;

2. Navigate to the location of the Fledermaus installation file and run the following command, replacing <VERSION> with the version and build of Fledermaus (example: Fledermaus-FM-RC-W64-771-428.exe):

   CODE

   Fledermaus-FM-RC-W64-<VERSION>.exe /QUIET /PASSIVE /qn /NORESTART

3. Wait until the Fledermaus icon appears on the Desktop;

Silent Uninstall - Step-by-step guide

1. Open a Command Prompt as an Admin user;
   1. Depending on the version of Windows that you are running, the Command Prompt can be found by using the Start Menu search functionality or the Start Menu Run... command. Make sure that you are running a Command Prompt with elevated privileges or the installer will prompt you to verify that you want to execute portions of the install;

2. Run the following command:

   CODE

   msiexec /uninstall {04BE590F-03C8-4795-B856-6ACDC2C0784C} /QUIET /PASSIVE /qn /NORESTART

3. The weird number above (wrapped in curly-brackets) is the Product Code associated with Fledermaus 7.7.x+. This code will change when A major update of Fledermaus is released;

Debugging The Install

Because the Fledermaus installer is based on MSI technology, you can pass additional parameters. Please see the msiexec documentation for further details.

One option for debugging the install process is to generate a log of the install via the msiexec functionality. This can be achieved by appending the following to the commands noted above:

/L*V C:\Fledermaus-install.log

Note that in this case we are attempting to generate a log file on the main C: drive of the target PC. This is not necessary, as the log file can be generated anywhere that the user wants, or has access to, by changing the path at the end of the line.

An example install command with the debug/logging option would be:

Fledermaus-FM-RC-W64-711-428.exe /QUIET /PASSIVE /qn /NORESTART /L*V C:\Fledermaus-install.log

An example uninstall command with the debug/logging option would be: 

 msiexec /uninstall {04BE590F-03C8-4795-B856-6ACDC2C0784C} /QUIET /PASSIVE /qn /NORESTART /L*V C:\Fledermaus-uninstall.log

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