Land Desktop 2005 Deploy Glitches

I just finished upgrading the license manager and setting up deployment
images for Land Desktop 2005, Civil Design 2005, Survey 2005, and Raster
Design 2005. I have successfully installed the products on a laptop for
evaluation before I roll the upgrade (from Land Desktop 3) out to the rest
of the office. However, this process was not without some glitches that, in
my opinion, should not have occurred. They are:

1. The network authorization wizard does not exist. After searching
everywhere for this utility I finally logged onto this newsgroup and found
that it was not included with any of the Land Desktop products. You would
think that Autodesk could have changed the instructions in the CD browser to
reflect this. I ultimately obtained my license files via the registration
website.

2. The initial deployment image for Land Desktop 2005 contained an empty
EULA folder, which caused the install to abort with an error. I searched the
newsgroups and found a thread about this problem occurring in 2004 if an
apostrophe was included in the personalization information. I did not have
any but I did include parentheses in the support phone number which I
removed when I re-created the image. Same result. Finally I just manually
copied the contents of the EULA folder on the CD to the folder in the
deployment and the install proceeded without problems.

3. Finally I checked the box for the Express Tools to be installed when
creating the deployment and the folder was left empty. On my test laptop I
popped disk 2 in and manually installed the express tools. I also copied the
contents of the express tools folder on the CD to the same in my deployment
folder and assume that the express tools will be included with future
installs, but I have not yet verified this.

Again, I ultimately got everything to work but I wanted to post this so that
others experiencing similar issues might read this and be spared some of the
frustration.

-Mark

 

Mark - thanks for this info! I'm going to have the exact same installation
coming up in the next couple weeks.

John

 

Mark:

The express tools does seem to get installed correctly with the deployment
when you add it manually.

Did you add any custom support file search path information when creating
your deployment? I would like to add this to your list of glitches, because
it doesn't seem to be added to the deployment - probably because it's not
added to lddt.arg and map.arg.

Sincerely,
Drew Burgasser
CAD Masters, Inc.

 

Drew - how exactly, (where), did you setup the Express Tools folder in your
deployment image to get them to install correctly? I haven't been able to
get this to work yet.

Thanks - John

 

I copied the contents of the express folder on the cd (I forget which cd
no.) to the empty express folder within the deployment:
\\"server"\"share"\"ldtdeployment"\AdminImage\support\Express

Sincerely,
Drew
CAD Masters, Inc.

 

Hmmm...I've done exactly the same thing and nothing happens at all. The
Express folders aren't even going to the client computers...

John

 

I'm even having problems loading them manually. They "appear" to install
correctly using setup.exe in the Express folder, then upon starting LDT I
get the following message:

Loading AEC Detail Base...acet-reg-get: cannot open subkey
Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R16.1\ACAD-308:409\ExpressTools

AutoCAD Express Tools Copyright © 2002-2004 Autodesk, Inc.
acet-reg-get: cannot open subkey
Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R16.1\ACAD-308:409\ExpressTools

This has me bummed...

John

 

Do the acetmain.* (6 files I believe) files exist in...
C:\Documents and Settings\"Username"\Application Data\Autodesk\Autodesk Land
Desktop 2005\R16.1\enu\Support
?

 

That was it, at least as far as them working from a manual installation. The
problem is we have a very customized installation and are trying to keep
from having *any* files referenced in the user profile folders. I'm having
quite a bit of success in my deployment image by adding user files and a
modified .arg file. Part of the problem may be that I've been uninstalling
and installing tests on the same computer and something may be getting left
behind in the registry, even though I'm deleting the folders each time. I'm
going to test it on a virgin machine next...

Thanks!

John