Whenever we talk about standardization or open standards, we immediately think of FOSS, FSF, Mozilla and even the IETE, W3C, etc., who are supposed to set standards for software and tools.
Over the weekend, a friend’s PC packed up - no surprises there, as he allowed his 13 and 10 year olds unfettered access to the PC, a Core2Duo, with ‘their’ user IDs enabled with Admin privileges; the PC did not have any decent Antivirus or Firewall (even software), which I guess is the default standards in India - no wonder we have become the 'spam capital' of the World.
To cut the story short and to save a couple of hundred Rupees, he fell back on the tried and trusted yours truly to set it right. When I went into the PC it was infected with a Trojan and W32.Sality.
The Trojan could be removed with SuperAntiSpyware but W32.sality confounded all my efforts - it just did not allow any removal tool to be installed or if installed (when I tried), like my true and tested Comodo Internet Security, did not allow it to function.
How I managed a workaround (on Saturday, 07 Jan) to save ~20 GB of critical/important data without removing/copying out the data from the 250GB Hard Disk, while successfully cleaning the HDD of virus/malware requires its own post.
Luckily (and a very rare occurrence here), my friend owned a Genuine Windows XP. Not so lucky for me as it turned out. As it was a original version (from before when he had an older PC), it was original WinXP without any Service Packs.
That was unlucky for me in the sense I *had* to consolidate the XPonlyOS pack, if I had any hope of getting in and out quick. Which was good, because I could apply all the patches in about 15 minutes.
That gave me an idea - if I could just build a batch file for all the essential/minimal software needed - like JRE, .NET, IE8, SpybotS&D, K-Lite Codecs, Flash Player, etc., - you get the idea - the whole torture would be completed in another 20 minutes or so. Which it was.
:-D
By now, you must be wondering ‘what is this rant all about, then?’
The problem was it took me more than 4 hours to find out about the switches needed by each particular software for such ‘unattended’ or ‘silent’ installs.
8-0
Just have a look at the image below. Each one has a different switch - all for the same reason - to enable a ‘silent’ install. What is worse, even switches which look same at a cursory glance like ‘/s’ and ‘/S’ (capitalizing), matters. JRE for eg., would not install if you use the capital ‘/S’ instead of the small ‘/s’.
Even within MS products, WindowsXP hotfixes work with ‘/u’ (for unattended), while .NET would not - they want the switch to be ‘/quiet’ or ‘/passive’.
Sheesh!
With so many buggers talking about ‘open’ or ‘common’ standards on the Web - the Web - they can’t even get a simple cohesive approach to implementation of switches.
God help us!
The worst kick-in-the-wrong-place was by Mozilla in the Firefox setup file. While all others, thankfully, seem to have named their files without any ‘space’ characters, Mozilla’s Firefox still goes
Oops! sorry! Keeping in line with Mozilla it should have been written as “double quotes”
:-P
Too late in the day to post the actual batch file - it has to wait for the morrow! (along with some more rants)
Over the weekend, a friend’s PC packed up - no surprises there, as he allowed his 13 and 10 year olds unfettered access to the PC, a Core2Duo, with ‘their’ user IDs enabled with Admin privileges; the PC did not have any decent Antivirus or Firewall (even software), which I guess is the default standards in India - no wonder we have become the 'spam capital' of the World.
To cut the story short and to save a couple of hundred Rupees, he fell back on the tried and trusted yours truly to set it right. When I went into the PC it was infected with a Trojan and W32.Sality.
The Trojan could be removed with SuperAntiSpyware but W32.sality confounded all my efforts - it just did not allow any removal tool to be installed or if installed (when I tried), like my true and tested Comodo Internet Security, did not allow it to function.
How I managed a workaround (on Saturday, 07 Jan) to save ~20 GB of critical/important data without removing/copying out the data from the 250GB Hard Disk, while successfully cleaning the HDD of virus/malware requires its own post.
Luckily (and a very rare occurrence here), my friend owned a Genuine Windows XP. Not so lucky for me as it turned out. As it was a original version (from before when he had an older PC), it was original WinXP without any Service Packs.
That was unlucky for me in the sense I *had* to consolidate the XPonlyOS pack, if I had any hope of getting in and out quick. Which was good, because I could apply all the patches in about 15 minutes.
That gave me an idea - if I could just build a batch file for all the essential/minimal software needed - like JRE, .NET, IE8, SpybotS&D, K-Lite Codecs, Flash Player, etc., - you get the idea - the whole torture would be completed in another 20 minutes or so. Which it was.
:-D
By now, you must be wondering ‘what is this rant all about, then?’
The problem was it took me more than 4 hours to find out about the switches needed by each particular software for such ‘unattended’ or ‘silent’ installs.
8-0
Just have a look at the image below. Each one has a different switch - all for the same reason - to enable a ‘silent’ install. What is worse, even switches which look same at a cursory glance like ‘/s’ and ‘/S’ (capitalizing), matters. JRE for eg., would not install if you use the capital ‘/S’ instead of the small ‘/s’.
Even within MS products, WindowsXP hotfixes work with ‘/u’ (for unattended), while .NET would not - they want the switch to be ‘/quiet’ or ‘/passive’.
Sheesh!
With so many buggers talking about ‘open’ or ‘common’ standards on the Web - the Web - they can’t even get a simple cohesive approach to implementation of switches.
God help us!
The worst kick-in-the-wrong-place was by Mozilla in the Firefox setup file. While all others, thankfully, seem to have named their files without any ‘space’ characters, Mozilla’s Firefox still goes
- ‘Firefox Setup 9.0.1.exe’ instead of
- ‘Firefox-Setup-9.0.1.exe’ or
- ‘Firefox_Setup_9.0.1.exe’,
Oops! sorry! Keeping in line with Mozilla it should have been written as “double quotes”
:-P
Too late in the day to post the actual batch file - it has to wait for the morrow! (along with some more rants)
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