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IzPack 4.1.1 released

I am reposting the news from our Confluence space at Codehaus:

On behalf of the IzPack project, I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of the version 4.1.1 of the project!

Many thanks to the developers and contributors for making this release possible!

IzPack is a one-stop solution for packaging, distributing and deploying applications.

It is fully cross-platform and generates a single installer. As such, it is an alternative to native solutions such as platform-specific installers and package managers.

IzPack-generated installers only require a Java virtual machine to run.

Many companies and projects have been using IzPack over the years.

IzPack version 4.1.1 is a maintenance release to the IzPack 4.1 branch that provides useful fixes. As a consequence, we advise our users to switch to this new release.

IzPack can be downloaded from http://izpack.org/ and is a member of Codehaus (see http://codehaus.org/).

Release Notes - IzPack - Version 4.1.1

Bug

* [IZPACK-107] - Creation of the uninstaller is still unconditional
* [IZPACK-172] - Unable to interpolate variable
* [IZPACK-175] - izpack2app runtime error
* [IZPACK-178] - Conditions on packs do not work properly
* [IZPACK-181] - In UserInputPanel the search field doesn't substitute variables
* [IZPACK-189] - izpack2app.py fails with error "File exists"
* [IZPACK-192] - In UserPathPanel variables aren't substituted
* [IZPACK-193] - HTMLInfoPanel does not show html files

Improvement

* [IZPACK-170] - Italian langpack update

New Feature

* [IZPACK-174] - Support for izpack2exe and izpack2app

Task

* [IZPACK-171] - Release izpack-standalone-4.1.0 to maven repository
* [IZPACK-180] - Update French LangPack
* [IZPACK-182] - Reformat Eng LangPack

I hope that you will enjoy this release!

Some new nice features will appear in the next major release (4.2.0), including the ability to elevate execution permissions and generating JNLP (Java Web Start) descriptors. Stay tuned!

IzPack installers with privileged permissions

One common issue when dealing with installers is that they sometimes need to be run with privileged permissions: think root on Unix or an administrator on Windows. Otherwise some operations are not permitted such as writing to /usr/local/ or putting some system-wide entries in the infamous Windows registry.

The classic solution is of course to ask your end-users to run your installer as the right user, but I guess you agree that this is not very user-friendly...

With IzPack things have never been easy on this point, as telling your users to "launch a JVM as an administrator" is all but an easy thing.

There has been a workaround for some time under Windows Vista, as one can wrap an installer JAR into a self-extracting executable using our izpack2exe script. As long as the filename contains "setup" or "install", Windows Vista asks for a privileges elevation. This is of course not really satisfactory, as it requires some further efforts and does not work everywhere (plus you have to ship JAR and EXE versions of the same installer).

Fortunately the latest Subversion trunk of IzPack just fixes that The next screenshot shows the result on Mac OS X through the familiar security dialog box.

To do that, we had to make some OS-specific workarounds to relaunch JVMs, as there is unfortunately no way in the Java APIs to ask a JVM to run as a different user (or even better, as what the guest OS calls an administrator).

On Windows, we use a JScript that is an adaptation of the one from Aaron Margosis 'elevate.js' script. On Windows XP, a dialog appears and asks you under which account the application should be run, and on Windows Vista, a privileges escalation is proposed to the user through the familiar UAC machanisms (you know the UAC: it's the thing that constantly pops you to make sure that you indeed clicked there or there ).

On Mac OS X, we use a native universal application that calls the security framework (the source code lives in a Git repository at Github, feel free to reuse!).

Finally on Unix systems we chose a least-common denominator approach by relying on the presence of xterm and sudo.

You can already sample this in a special version of the experimental installer for Glassfish v3 Prelude. Of course you can also checkout the source code from our SVN trunk and see for yourself

The last thing left to implement is to port the feature to uninstallers, as otherwise they are unable to properly remove what installers had put in the first place.

Feedback is more that welcome! I think this feature will make IzPack-based installers even more appealing... remember: Package Once. Deploy everywhere!

IzPack-based installer for GlassFish v3 Prelude

Update (2008-11-08): (yes, again!) the 'exec-admin' installer is now expected to work under XP/Vista.

Update (2008-11-08): the version that attempts to run as an administrator does not work well on XP/Vista. It works fine on any other platform (Linux, OS X, ...). A fix will appear soon.

As promised yesterday, I have released an updated installer for GlassFish v3 Prelude!

This installer must be considered as beta quality.

It is based on a very bleeding-edge build of IzPack from the Subversion trunk of the project. Especially, there is a version that attempts to elevate its permissions to those of an administrator. This feature went into the IzPack SVN trunk yesterday, so this will be a good occasion to spot issues.

Here are the links to the installers:

• http://dist.codehaus.org/izpack/showcases/glassfish-v3-prelude-install.jar (you may have to launch it as an administrator, especially on Windows Vista)
• http://dist.codehaus.org/izpack/showcases/glassfish-v3-prelude-install-exec-admin.jar (it will try to launch as an administrator / this is highly experimental)

Thanks a lot for testing and reporting me any issue! I will take into account all your feedback to improve the GlassFish v3 Prelude installers very soon.

By-the-way there is still the GlassFish v2 UR2 installer, available for download and rock-solid. We've deployed it successfully in my University for students labs, both on Windows XP and CentOS 5.