Experimental New Windows Mobile Installer

[mikelove]

(or "How Michael Spent His Friday")

Posted at:

http://www.pleco.com/beta/pc2b8a-newinstalltest2.zip

Basically what we've done in this is take all of the card management / ActiveSync / file copying code out of the regular b8 Windows Mobile installer and wrap it up in its own independent application; we're hoping that by simplifying things (not trying to handle file compression / integrity-checking / etc in the same program) we can make it more stable / reliable than the current automated installer (which we haven't been able to make much progress on fixing the bugs in).

So this new installer is just a little utility program that you stick in the same directory as your Pleco 2.0 installation files; when you launch it it crawls around and creates a list of all of the Pleco-related files it can find in its current directory (or any subdirectories), then it runs you through an installation pretty much identical to the old automated install (choose components, choose card, copy files, etc).

An added bonus is that because it's not tied to a specific package of installation files, it can handle files that aren't part of the main install; if you put the extended audio files or the free dictionaries in the same directory it'll find and offer to install them for you as well. It also seems to be a bit faster than the old one, though that may just be my imagination...

To use this, download the "Manual" Windows Mobile version of Pleco 2.0, extract it to a folder, then place setup.exe and the "InstFiles" folder from the above archive inside of that folder. So you'll end up with setup.exe, an InstFiles folder, a Pleco folder, and a couple of .CABs all in the same place. Then simply run the installer - the interface is almost exactly the same as the previous Automated installer (with the addition of an "Install Add-Ons" option that you can use to copy over flashcard lists and the like).

Please note that this is an EXPERIMENTAL program and hence should be used with caution - if you've got a lot of sensitive data on your computer / handheld that you haven't backed up you should probably not be using this.

 

[donneh]

Eeek its a no go here - As soon as a run setup.exe I get an error...
"The application has failed to start becuase the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem." Even after a reboot etc..

Just to clarify that I have the right files in the directory I have posted a screenshot...



(As an aside have done a successful manual install of the beta and it really is fantastic stuff - not used many advanced features, but the stroke order component and speech are a godsend. Truly excellent what you've done!)

 

[westmeadboy]

I'm still downloading (the manual install zip) thanks to my high-speed indian internet connection. Just two more hours to go...

I'll hold off until donneh's is working

 

[mikelove]

donneh - eep, sorry about that - forgot to link in the runtime library correctly. Anyway, here's a fixed link:

http://www.pleco.com/beta/pc2b8a-newinstalltest2.zip

Just checked this on a non-development system here and it seemed to work correctly (after putting up that same error when I tried using the older version on it).

The files in that screenshot look correct, by the way.

 

[westmeadboy]

Thats strange - I ran the first installer (pc2b8a-newinstalltest.zip) and it worked fine! How is this possible if the runtime library was not linked in????

 

[Chinesesnowsports]

hi mike, i am running version 1.0 Pelecodict on my Dopod D810 or HTC. I tried to get the new .exe file to upgrade to the 2.0 release but having no luck.

 

[mikelove]

westmeadboy - the runtime was linked in, but dynamically instead of statically, so it needed the VC8 runtime DLL to be installed on your system - I believe it's built into Vista, so even if you aren't a programmer it would probably work correctly on that, but on XP it's not there unless you put there. The updated version links statically (only adds about 30k to the filesize) so it doesn't depend on anything except the core Windows libraries / common controls / etc.

Chinesesnowsports - you need to download this and the manual install version, this file by itself won't install anything. See the instructions for more details, or wait for the finished release when the new installer should be better documented.

 

[bglasow]

Windows Vista Business SP1
HTC Diamond connected via Windows Mobile Device Center

The installation works fine for me. No extra escalation privileges were needed on Vista although it did prompt for confirmation at run time. Here's a couple of notes on the install process:
1) Gives no option to install PlecoLaunch, even though the cab file is there
2) Gives no option to install PlecoConverter, even though the cab file is there
3) Gives no option to install the files to the Program Files\Pleco directory on my storage card. Instead it puts them at \Pleco folder on my storage card.
4) The first few times I tried to install with this tool it would die with an error when installing one of the extended audio files. (ERROR: Failed to write file: \Internal Storage\Pleco\p2audio-man-x2.pdb: CeWriteFile: 10053). I finally decided to install everything except extended audio and it worked fine. Later I re-downloaded the extended audio zip, extracted the files again and reran the installation. This time I deselected everything except the extended audio files and ran it on top of the prior installation to my windows mobile device. It worked fine.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the feedback on this.

On #1 and #2, the installer doesn't actually copy over .cab files, only .exes, so the reason those files aren't listed as options is because we forgot to include them in the "InstFiles" folder. (thanks for noticing that, could easily have overlooked it in the finished release)

#3 works that way because we want files to be installed to a consistent location across all Windows Mobile install types, and several of the other installs would be much more likely to confuse people if we made them create / check for a Program Files folder and copy the files into there instead of putting them in the root directory of the card. They should certainly work OK if moved to Program Files, though - just make sure to exit Pleco completely (Quit command, Dict menu) before moving them.

#4 I'm not sure about - the error code is listed as "An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine," which suggests that ActiveSync at some point decided it had had enough of file-copying for one session I think for now the best fix for this would probably just be to recommend that people install the extended audio files separately, which we can certainly do (good idea anyway, really, since even with ActiveSync working correctly they could potentially cause an out-of-memory error or other problem that would prevent the main software from working like it's supposed to).

 

[bglasow]

For #4 I also think it is possible my download of the extended audio zip just got corrupted and forced Activesync to crash midway into the file. May be that is why it worked the second time after I had re-downloaded and re-extracted the zip?

Agreed a good approach would be to install that part separately.

 

[mikelove]

Could be a corrupted download, I guess, though I'm not quite sure why that would have caused a crash on the installer end. Anyway since nobody seems to be having any problems with this now we've made it part of RC2, so hopefully WM installations will be running more smoothly from now on - if a few of you wouldn't mind testing it again (it's now packaged up in an auto-extracting WinZip .exe - we realized putting it in a regular .zip archive could be problematic since that wouldn't guarantee all of the files were getting extracted along with setup.exe) we'd really appreciate some confirmation that it's still working correctly.

 

[donneh]

Sorry I have been a bit quiet about the installer bug and I suppose I should tell you if its working on mine since I reported the problem to start with! I'll download the full install tommorow morning (internet is too slow in the evening!) and report if it all works then...

 

[mikelove]

No problem! Glad to hear that fixed it.

 

[donneh]

Pleased to report the latest release pc2b8b.exe installs with no problems here! (EEE running XP SP3 to HP iPAQ114) There are two things which might be considered for a later version though:

1) The install automatically unzips to the C: drive - as my system drive isn't very big it would be nice to have the option to specify the location which files are extracted to, or at least a check that there is enough space on C: to unzip...
2) While files are being unzipped, clicking anywhere on the dialogue prompts the user if they want to cancel (as opposed to this only happening if you click on the cancel button).

Otherwise everything is working great!

 

[mikelove]

Glad to hear it!

Re your suggestions, we do let you customize the install directory in the current (PlecoDict 1.0) Windows Mobile installer, but we specifically took that out in the new one because it creates a lot of confusion; people don't understand that they're choosing a directory for the temporary installation files, rather than the directory where files are being installed on their handheld, and they get annoyed when the installer won't let them choose their handheld as the install directory.

Good point on #2, though I don't know if this is something WinZip actually lets us customize.