[Famer]

hey guys what's is this xplode program about and what is it used for or how can it be used

[shawn26]

Wraith would say.....

*bashes head against the wall*
*bashes head against the wall*

Try the search engine. There would be many information ybout XPlode!
But i will explain in one sentence!

Unattended Installation of WinXP or W2K, hotfixes, applications, adding users and groups, copying files and directories and so on...

Here (where it could be run): T13 min, T12 min, T9 min, after first logon
Here (XPlode 1.0x Plugin Development): Plugin Development


Wraith:

Quote

It's the new, completely rewritten XPinstall.

I wasn't terribly happy with more than half of my code, so I decided to rewrite it - figured a name change would be a Good Thing ™

Shawn26

[Famer]

seems to indepth for me right now i will stick with GM's progie seems like the Xplode program runs like his

[Alanoll]

oiy...

*bashes head against the wall*
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Famer, if you don't understand something, you really should try the search first. You could have also LOOKED in the sicky seciton, or even possibly, oh i don't know, SEARCHED XPLODE or XPINSTALL.

THIS IS NOT LIKE GM's XPCreate. It has the capibilities of running programs and thats about all that is the same between the two. This does OTHER STUFF.

[Famer]

okie guys cool out you guys build progies s fast around here and no one puts up a how to guid with any of them it's kinda hard to tell what they do and dont do

[Wraith]

There's something that's been stated before, but obviously needs stating again.

Search the forum.


And for the benefit of Mr Kite, there will be a show tonight, on the wall.
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[Alanoll]

Famer, on Feb 29 2004, 06:08 PM, said:

okie guys cool out you guys build progies s fast around here and no one puts up a how to guid with any of them it's kinda hard to tell what they do and dont do

WHOA!!

no one puts out a how to. If there sufficient documentation there is NEVER a need for a how to. Did you honestly need a how to to run windows?

There is a how to to get the program running. There is documentation with a PICTURE of what the program could look like WHILE running.

Famer, you need to READ before asking questions. You obviously don't sometimes.

[Aaron]

A picture says a thousand words

*bashes head against wall*

[Famer]

@ you guys Wise Asses lol

[LANJAN]

I kind of agree with Famer.
I have been looking around a bit in order to learn a bit more about XPlode.
But since XPlode is never mentioned in any guide on how to make an unattended xp install and since I dont really know what it does (and the sticky posts don't help either) I did not feel the need to download or use it, since the unattended install works fine without an extra tool. So someone tell me what is the BENEFIT of using XPload, what can it do, that I cannot do with winnt.sif?
A screenshot and a cryptic description on how to start it don't give me too much information on all that.
I mean if I can start the executable for XPload I can as well start any Batchfile.

Maybe what people need is not a "How To" guide but perhaps an introduction to what exactly that thing is, and a reference to the documentation.
Maybe you should make the documentation available over the net, so people can determine if this method is worth trying out before they download another tool, spend time with it and then figure out that is not what they want.
I guess that would be better that continuously banging your head against a wall.

Regards
-LANJAN-

[XtremeMaC]

haha maybe its because it was called xpinstall
but it doesn't matter
because I think at least alanoll's signature explains everything.
and also if u look at the unattended guide there is a nice link to ppl's creations of programs and its also in threads of interest
i think u didn't click enough

let me go with the trend as well :

*bashes head against the wall*

[Wraith]

XtremeMaC, on Mar 5 2004, 12:10 PM, said:

Oh man, I wish I had thought of doing that earlier...

[Wraith]

LANJAN, on Mar 5 2004, 11:42 AM, said:

I kind of agree with Famer.
I have been looking around a bit in order to learn a bit more about XPlode.
But since XPlode is never mentioned in any guide on how to make an unattended xp install and since I dont really know what it does (and the sticky posts don't help either) I did not feel the need to download or use it, since the unattended install works fine without an extra tool. So someone tell me what is the BENEFIT of using XPload, what can it do, that I cannot do with winnt.sif?
A screenshot and a cryptic description on how to start it don't give me too much information on all that.
I mean if I can start the executable for XPload I can as well start any Batchfile.

Maybe what people need is not a "How To" guide but perhaps an introduction to what exactly that thing is, and a reference to the documentation.
Maybe you should make the documentation available over the net, so people can determine if this method is worth trying out before they download another tool, spend time with it and then figure out that is not what they want.
I guess that would be better that continuously banging your head against a wall.

Regards
-LANJAN-

XPlode is less than a month old. Not too many people have been using it to do an unattended setup, which is why there's no OFFICIAL how-to.

You'll find that there is documentation available, on the XPlode website.

Now, just looking at the forum, there's no sticky saying where the site is, so that will be rectified in the near future.

However, if you had read both mine and Alanoll's signatures, the links there will undoubtedly explain what it is, how to run it, and all the documentation to set it up.

As for benefits, I'm not going to list any because it's up to the user's preference. If they decide XPlode is better than command lines and whatnot, they'll use it. If they come to the conclusion that the converse is true, then they will use cmdlines. All it boils down to is whether the user wants to use it or not.

[XtremeMaC]

haha

[patters]

I don't think you're being very fair to the original poster. As someone who discovered this today, I'm still not sure what the point of Xplode is. I've looked at the site, and I've also downloaded the package. I do not see any basic documentation explaining what it's use is. Sure there's a ton of stuff on here about very specific XML setups etc. but at the end of the day there is no clear explanation beyond this:

Quote

XPlode is a tool which aids installation of programs during a Windows XP / 2003 installation. (Even been known to run under Win2K! Requires a copy of GDIPLUS.DLL.)

This thread goes into a lot of detail (http://www.msfn.org/...showtopic=15076) but I'm still not sure what's so great about Xplode. Is it just a graphical frontend to the usual unattended install progress that happens to use the same look and feel as Microsoft's installer to make your install generally look better?

Here are the most obvious questions I can think of having looked at the screenshots and read what little I could find, so maybe there should be a FAQ on the site.

. Does it seamlessly graft onto the existing Windows install screens? i.e. can you use the normal Windows layout, fonts and graphics?
. What is XPInstall.exe (mentioned in the Docs but not in the downloadable archive)? Is this the Microsoft binary, or was it some prior version of Xplode.exe?

[Alanoll]

all fonts you can used have to be registered on the system (basically in the font folder, and the registry entries entered).
Graphics, I beleive it supports most graphic formats you may wish to use.

By seamless graft onto the existing Windows, I guess you mean the GUIInstall mode. This XPlode running in a trasparent background state and draws right on top of the "advertisements" during the Windows Setup. If you use this at first startup (via GUIRunOnce or the like) then I would advise StandAlone which would be like a RunOnceEX box, but instead however you speficy in the configs how you want it to look.

Not sure what you mean by Windows Layout, sorry.

XPInstall.exe, that was a previous incarnation of XPlode.exe, but the name was changed as another XPInstall program was found and Wraith didn't want any trouble later on.

[patters]

Alanoll, on Mar 18 2004, 07:52 AM, said:

all fonts you can used have to be registered on the system (basically in the font folder, and the registry entries entered).
Graphics, I beleive it supports most graphic formats you may wish to use.

By seamless graft onto the existing Windows, I guess you mean the GUIInstall mode. This XPlode running in a trasparent background state and draws right on top of the "advertisements" during the Windows Setup. If you use this at first startup (via GUIRunOnce or the like) then I would advise StandAlone which would be like a RunOnceEX box, but instead however you speficy in the configs how you want it to look.

Not sure what you mean by Windows Layout, sorry.

XPInstall.exe, that was a previous incarnation of XPlode.exe, but the name was changed as another XPInstall program was found and Wraith didn't want any trouble later on.

Thanks Alanoll that has cleared things up. So really the major advantage is cosmetic (progress bars etc.).

[Alanoll]

pretty much
but there is also plugin support so say someone makes a plugin to do something (logon to a Domain maybe, i dunno), you just drop it into the XPlode folder and the comman is accessible through XPlode.

say you want to Create a shortut at runtime, the new XPlode has a function to do that.

but its pretty much cosmetics

[big_gie]

I think XPlode's first intend can be interpreted from the screen shots.

While installing Windows XP (or whatever else), instead of having an ugly dos box openned to install your apps, you get a nice gui window, period

thats the goal of XPlode and I don't understand why it should be so difficult to understand? Of course there is some advanced features like plugins and GUIInstall/Standalone, but those are just details... the goal is really just running your command a nice way!

Maybe the screenshots should be updated with a more "intuitive" ones?

[Wraith]

Maybe they should. If someone wants to make some for me, I'd be quite grateful

On a sidenote, all XML's for v1.0.5+ will now need to be UNICODE... not UTF-8, not ISO-8859-1, not UNICODE(Big Endian), but plain old UNICODE. Codepage 1200 if you're interested.

This SEEMS to have fixed some, if not all, regionalisation issues. Will test it with things like chinese characters in a short while.