Google Chrome for Mac out
by Mats Hellman on 08.Dec, 2009 under Uncategorized
Finally the Google Chrome browser is out for OSX. I’ve been using it on and off in Windows 7 for a few months and now I can finally start using it in my Mac’s also. A big thank’s to the Chrome team for getting it out.
It’s still a beta but works like a charm in OS X 10.5. Go get your’s from http://www.google.com/chrome
CSS Reset by Eric Meyer
by Mats Hellman on 12.Nov, 2009 under Uncategorized
Anyone working with web design knows styling can sometimes be a real pain in the a**. Sometimes the styles just won’t do what you expect them to do and it might be a challenge to find out why.
Today I had a problem like this and couldn’t find the problem anywhere. I then remembered Eric Meyers great reset CSS and added it to the page. Magically everything fell into place. I felt like a moron since I forgot to add it earlier.
Anyway, you can find this great and useful CSS reset at http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
Distributing Adobe Reader using Group policies
by Mats Hellman on 29.Oct, 2009 under Uncategorized
I see a lot of search engine traffic to this site when people are trying to find out how to deploy Adobe Reader using Active Directory Group Policy Objects (GPO’s). Since I wrote my previous two articles Adobe has changed their policy a bit. You need to ask them for a distribution license.
Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader centrally with Active Directory group policies
by Mats Hellman on 16.Jan, 2008 under Uncategorized
One of the greatest challenges in administering a large number of computers is software installations and updates. In this short hands on article I will take you through the installation of one of the more popular applications, Acrobat Reader. We will take a look at how to create the needed .msi package and how to deploy it enterprise wide using Microsoft Active Directory.
First of all let’s get the software and the tools needed to complete this. To set everything up correctly we need the Acrobat Reader and the Adobe Customization Wizard 8. Both can be found on . Follow the download links below.
NOTE: Upgrade guide available
Adobe Acrobat Reader
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
Adobe Customization Wizard 8
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3564
Next install the Adobe Customization Wizard and fire it up.
Preparing the installation package
Now let’s extract the .msi file from the Adobe Acrobat reader installation file. If you downloaded the Acrobat Reader installation package to the desktop you can copy & paste the command otherwise change the path to match your system.
1. Select Run from Start menu and paste the following
“%UserProfile%\Desktop\AdbeRdr811_en_US” -nos_ne
2. Click Ok.
3. When the Setup screen clears select run from the start menu again and in the run field paste %temp%
4. Copy the Acrobat Reader 8 folder to your desktop
Next let’s change some of the .msi settings using the Adobe Customization Wizard.
- Open the AcroRead.msi file using ACW.
- Go to the setting EULA and Online Features
- I usually like to suppress the display of the EULA. Be sure to read the EULA before you do this because you will be accepting it on behalf of your whole organization by selecting this.
- I also disable all updates. The reason to do this is because we will be installing and upgrading this package trough Group policy in the future, and we don’t want users to upgrade to something the IT department hasn’t had time to test in our environment.
- I like the Open/Save dialog because I really want to choose if I want to download or just open a PDF. So I check that one to.
- All software purchases are handeled by the IT department so we disable the Purchase Adobe Acrobat feature
- You can check the other settings also if there is something else you want to change if not just go to the next point.
- Choose File>Save package.
Now you have a customized Acrobat reader package to deploy with Active Directory group policy.
Setting up the Group policy deployment
Group policy management console
I like to use the Group policy management console. You can just use the group policy editor but the management console gives you a good overview on how your policies are linked and a list of your policies. So if you don’t have it download GPMC SP1 from Microsoft
Install it to your server or your desktop. It really doesn’t matter.
Create the file share
To deploy the application it needs to be accessible to all the computers that are going to install it so firs we need to create a file share. Choose a fileserver in your organization and copy the Acrobat Reader 8 folder from your desktop to that share. In my example it will be \\odin\userapps
I like to use the share userapps since it describes what is in the share and it isolates the share from other shares.
Create the policy
No let’s create the policy to distribute the software. Open the group policy management console ( you can find it in administrative tools). Expand the domain and Group policy objects. Right click on group policy objects and select new. Name the new GPO Default software installations, because we can deploy all our standard software this way, not just Acrobat Reader. I also have a OU (organizational unit) in Active directory named Workstations where I keep all my normal workstations, this simplifies the linking of group policies.
Now that you have your GPO created right click it and select Edit. To install Acrobat reader for every user using the workstation we assign the installation to the computer not the user policy. So expand Computer Configuration – Software settings – Software Installations.
Then from the Action menu select New – Package. The setup will ask for the location of the file so navigate to the fileserver and the share where you stored the AcroRead.msi package. Select it and click open.
In the deploy software box check Assigned, this will install the package to the computers, note that published is only available when using user policies. Click Ok.
The package should now be in the list.
Close the group policy object editor.
Link the policy
We are now almost done. The last thing to do is to link this group policy so that computers in the organization start using it.
To do this just drag the newly created Default software installations policy to the OU you want to link it and drop it there. In my case the Workstations OU.
That’s it. You are done. When the computer updates to the new policy (cycles are 30-180 minutes) it will automatically install the package on the next reboot. If you want to try the package out immediately you can open a command prompt (CMD) and run the command
This will trigger the computer to refresh the policy immediately.
For questions on using group policies use the comments or visit our forums
Update guide
You can find a update guide on how to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat reader 9 at http://www.nixadmins.net/2008/08/20/upgrade-to-install-adobe-acrobat-reader-9-centrally-using-active-directory-group-policies/
Install Firefox 2.0.0.9 in CentOS 5 / RHEL 5
by Mats Hellman on 22.Nov, 2007 under Uncategorized
I have been using different Linux distributions on and of since 2001 and right now I’m using more than one of them. The one this short short story is about is CentOS 5 which is based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, so this should also work on RHEL 5 even if I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.
I’ve always liked the way CentOS works, it’s a very stable and working distro even if it doesn’t always have the latest software. This is why I had to manually install the latest stable Firefox, since Firefox 2 has many nice plugins I use. Here is how I did it.
First off all we need to install compat-libstdc++-33. Otherwise Firefox won’t run.
Then download the latest version of Firefox and unpack it to /usr/lib
Set the link for the binary
#mv firefox firefox-1.5
#ln -sf /usr/lib/firefox/firefox ./
Setting up the mplayerplug-in
#ln -sf /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mplayerplug-in* ./
Shutdown firefox and restart and you should have a working setup.
