Mozilla Firefox 30.0 deployment / Distribution help
Good morning Ninjas!
As we prepare to push out the KACE service desk to our users, we are going to make sure everyone has firefox. We have made quite a bit of changes to our KBOX via Jkuery and a lot of this does not work with IE if it is not in a certain compatibility / Emulation. This is thanks to vendors having extremely outdated websites that require IE7 or 8 compatibility. It's a pain. The solution: Make firefox the new company default browser and let them use IE when they need it for the super special vendors. I am able to set the default browser through Group Policy (a nice registry change and poof) HOWEVER not all of my environment has the latest firefox or Firefox at all. Currently 30.0 seems to be the most current, for this week.
Now there is an uninstaller so I have 1 software distro that would push out to uninstall, however it is a .exe and I have yet to work with non-msi's using software distro. Anytime I didn't run an MSI, I had to run a script.
That all being said: Does anyone have any experience pushing out mozilla to user PC's? Is there a "QUIET" way to do it since most mozilla installations require prompts.
I am going to keep playing around with the .exe for 30 and attempt to get that pushed, but I would love to cut out the 'playing' and have someone here lend an experience opinion.
For clarification: There is a .exe for uninstalling mozilla firefox, and a .exe for installing. I'd like to run the uninstall across the board then run the install. If this is easier done by turning it into an MSI, I'd love if someone took the time to show me HOW to make something into an MSI as everything I've read seems overly complicated for the task.
As we prepare to push out the KACE service desk to our users, we are going to make sure everyone has firefox. We have made quite a bit of changes to our KBOX via Jkuery and a lot of this does not work with IE if it is not in a certain compatibility / Emulation. This is thanks to vendors having extremely outdated websites that require IE7 or 8 compatibility. It's a pain. The solution: Make firefox the new company default browser and let them use IE when they need it for the super special vendors. I am able to set the default browser through Group Policy (a nice registry change and poof) HOWEVER not all of my environment has the latest firefox or Firefox at all. Currently 30.0 seems to be the most current, for this week.
Now there is an uninstaller so I have 1 software distro that would push out to uninstall, however it is a .exe and I have yet to work with non-msi's using software distro. Anytime I didn't run an MSI, I had to run a script.
That all being said: Does anyone have any experience pushing out mozilla to user PC's? Is there a "QUIET" way to do it since most mozilla installations require prompts.
I am going to keep playing around with the .exe for 30 and attempt to get that pushed, but I would love to cut out the 'playing' and have someone here lend an experience opinion.
For clarification: There is a .exe for uninstalling mozilla firefox, and a .exe for installing. I'd like to run the uninstall across the board then run the install. If this is easier done by turning it into an MSI, I'd love if someone took the time to show me HOW to make something into an MSI as everything I've read seems overly complicated for the task.
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Answers (1)
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Posted by:
BHC-Austin
9 years ago
It should be fairly simple to create the installer and the uninstaller. Using the EXE, the silent install switch is
-ms
and the silent uninstall is:
/S
(Note the captial S for the uninstall). I'm pretty sure if you just run the FF30 installer with that switch it will uninstall whatever version is installed.
All you need to do is associate the EXE with your Managed Install, and for the install command, just leave it at Default Installation, and put the appropriate switch in the "Additional Parameters" section.
If you've put the EXE inside a ZIP, you'll need to choose the option for Full Command Line and put the full EXE name and switch.
Here's some more info about installing FF: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Installer:Command_Line_Arguments
Comments:
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Thanks, I'm going to start playing with this now. If I run the 30.0 .exe with the -ms your saying it should uninstall the previous version / overwrite it automatically, or would it be "-ms /S" ? - Wildwolfay 9 years ago
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My understanding is you'd need to run them separately. Run it with /S first, then with -ms. They are both silent operations, though. - BHC-Austin 9 years ago
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Yeah I found that sentence about 3 seconds after posting a response. I will play around with it on a test PC, thanks for the simple answer of 'yes i can use .exe on a managed install push' though, as I never tried. - Wildwolfay 9 years ago
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Ignore my second question, the first line of the site you sent me to was :
DO NOT MIX command line options from different lines below (e.g. don't mix /S with /INI, etc.)
So hopefully the silent install overwrites it. - Wildwolfay 9 years ago-
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure the -ms optioin will cause it to override whatever version is installed. In fact, I vaguely remember when testing it here, it even downgrades. We had an install package that installed FF22, whereas I had PC with a newer version installed. When I pushed it to that PC, it actually downgraded to 22. - BHC-Austin 9 years ago
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I just setup the installer on managed installations and am going to play with both scenerios and I will report back so we can close up this issue :) - Wildwolfay 9 years ago
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So i just associated the 30.0 install to the 30.0 software, attempted to push it out with default configuration + -ms and the install attempts failed on a PC with 29.1 . I attempted the same .exe (30.0 installer) with /S and it upgraded from 29 > 30.0 silently.
Looks like the key is /S if they already have it, I'm guessing -ms will work if they don't have it.
We can close this up :) - Wildwolfay 9 years ago -
final report:
/S worked as a silent install on a PC with no mozilla as well. So it works for upgrade & no mozilla :) - Wildwolfay 9 years ago
EDIT:::: Used /S on a pc with NO mozilla firefox and install worked (silently)! - Wildwolfay 9 years ago