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Slimmed down Standalone Installer?

Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2014 9:08 pm
by sanGeoff
I can understand if its not feasible but I was just curious if its possible to customize the oXygen Author standalone installer (oxygenAuthor.exe). Or at least provide some parameters to the installer to tell it not to deploy some things. I know there is a portable version and a multi platform tar.

Its nice to run the installer so that oXygen is in the start menu and associated with file types. Almost 80% of the files the installer deploys though are not needed.

Our writers only work in DITA files and we have a customized DITA-OT version and JRE already. So the DITA-OT, JRE, and docbook that gets deployed are not needed.
It would make the deployment and install much faster without those things.

Perhaps it might be better to just use the multi platform tar and make a batch file to copy to PC, add start menu item, and associate file types.

Thanks,

Re: Slimmed down Standalone Installer?

Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2014 6:20 pm
by adrian
Hi,

If you find it's worth the trouble to save 100MB of disk space, then you could remove the folders of the large frameworks (DITA, DocBook, TEI) that you don't need. You can find them in Oxygen/frameworks (dita, docbook, tei).
I don't recommend removing any other framework folders (the rest amount to ~12MB), since it's not worth the space saved and you could unwillingly break the support for some of the other types of documents that the users may eventually need.

I don't recommend messing with the JRE bundled with Oxygen, even if you already have one installed on the machine for a couple of reasons:
1. The JRE that Oxygen bundles will save you and/or the user a lot of trouble, if/when the system JRE is broken or acting up.
2. The bundled JRE also prevents the exposure to random bugs in various versions of the JRE. We test Oxygen with that specific JRE version and fix whatever problems we find with that version. We cannot guarantee the full functionality of the product with any version of JRE.

Regards,
Adrian