Still more on Flash Installers
A follow up from today’s earlier post: some commenters mention that the disk image they downloaded contains a package like “normal”.
I’ve found at least five versions of the 11.5.502.146 installer:
All of these were downloaded today. Which version you get seems to depend on which browser you use!
Safari may lead you to one (if you decline the suggestion to also install Chrome you get a different one); Chrome returns another, and Firefox returns still another! And if you register to redistribute Flash and use the special URL you are given if/when you are approved for redistribution, you get yet another version.
And yet none of these are simply Apple packages. Sigh. They are either disk images that contain an application that contains a package, or disk images that contain an application that downloads another disk image that contains an application that contains a package.
On a related note, I recently watched Inception.
Explore posts in the same categories: Adobe, Deployment, General, Packaging
January 8, 2013 at 9:54 pm
“And yet none of these are simply Apple packages. Sigh. They are either disk images that contain an application that contains a package…”
This has been the standard Adobe behavior for a very long time now. Has Adobe ever offered a straight Apple installer package for Flash Player?
January 8, 2013 at 10:06 pm
Also, I just tried downloading FP using Safari, Chrome and Firefox. All browsers linked me to: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/completion/?installer=Flash_Player_11_for_Mac_OS_X_10.6_-_10.8
Not sure, but could it be a region / CDN thing? I’m in Japan, so maybe that’s why I’m seeing different behavior.
January 8, 2013 at 10:21 pm
No they haven’t not for a long time and that’s really a major problem with them (and pretty obvious evidence of a terribly run company internally if you think about it!) Its beyond evident multiple teams work on packaging internally and all of them have they own way and none of them follow best practices for either the OS X or Windows platform. It’s almost as if they treat it like they unlike anyone else including the companies who created the OSes themselves know how to package apps right and to hell with companies having specific installation mechanisms for their platforms.
January 8, 2013 at 10:59 pm
FWIW, trial and error led me to:
chrosx[ad]_d[yn]
Where:
a=accepted Chrome install
d=declined Chrome install
y=yes, set Chrome as default browser
n=no, don’t set Chrome as default browser
But it’s still a mess. This is one area I’m good with not having feature parity with Windows.
January 9, 2013 at 4:57 am
This is why I just use http://ftp.adobe.com from the Terminal to get my Adobe software. Much simpler, and you always get the simplest form of their stuff.
January 9, 2013 at 4:58 am
Argh…wordpress converted the url to ‘http://’ – I didn’t put that there. I just navigate around ftp[dot]adobe[dot]com from the ftp cli tool.
January 9, 2013 at 10:35 am
I don’t see a recent version of Flash at ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe Do you have a complete path?
January 9, 2013 at 11:03 am
You’re right….it would seem that Flash Player is one of the few things they don’t post there. I’ve been so accustomed to getting my Adobe Reader updates that way that I just made the (erroneous) assumption that all of Adobes wares were posted there. Sorry for the false lead!
January 9, 2013 at 5:30 am
[...] Yesterday a new version of Flash Player was released and with it came some more challenges regarding the Flash Player installer. Greg Neagle has compiled some information regarding the new installers which you can check out over on his blog. [...]
January 9, 2013 at 10:52 am
It appears that using:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html
will get you a page with a list of all of the available installers?
The URL doesn’t seem to be effected by using Safari, Chrome, or Firefox.
The DMG does have the “Install Adobe Flash Player.app” which contains the PKG file.
Using the -install option on the executable in Contents/MacOS appears to work.
January 11, 2013 at 3:22 am
And if you want to have yet another way to get Flash Player, use the Archived Versions Page at:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html
This will get you a zip archive containing debug- and non-debug versions and a lot of other stuff.
You are not allowed to redistribute those, however.
January 11, 2013 at 2:29 pm
and it still fubars up the system preferences update if you install via the package directly and not all the chrome.
Really? We have to go through this again?
sigh…getting mah beatin’ stick.
January 11, 2013 at 2:36 pm
I bet inception made more sense than this issue.
January 14, 2013 at 2:22 am
On a related note:
Shockwave_Installer_Full_64bit_11.6.8.638 now also contains a postflight script which launches a GUI application (possibly as root) to ask for installation of Google Chrome. At least it is one single file, and not 6 different ones.
Steps to get rid of that postflight script:
$ hdiutil attach ../Vendor\ Downloads/Shockwave_Installer_Full_64bit_11.6.8.638.dmg
$ pkgutil –expand “/Volumes/Adobe Shockwave 11/Shockwave_Installer_Full.pkg” Shockwave_Installer_Full_64bit_11.6.8.638_fixed/
$ cat > Shockwave_Installer_Full_64bit_11.6.8.638_fixed/shockwave11.pkg/Scripts/postinstall
#!/bin/bash
exit 0;
CTRL+D
$ pkgutil –flatten Shockwave_Installer_Full_64bit_11.6.8.638_fixed Shockwave_Installer_Full_64bit_11.6.8.638_fixed
January 15, 2013 at 4:57 pm
If you’ve already gone to the trouble of initially deploying Adobe Flash via, say, Munki and you have then pushed out a script to install Flash Player from the .app that Munki drops in the /Applications folder, then for a point update like this one it seems that everything works OK if you download the Flash installer from http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html (Thanks for the link, Jeffrey), open it, extract the .pkg installer from the Adobe .app installer and then push that out with Munki.
As the preference pane and the other things that get set up when you run the installer are already in place, this will update the plugin and everything seems to work. This saves you from having to repeat the initial installation process of pushing the .app installer to Applications and then bumping the version of your payload-free package with the postflight installer script.
March 28, 2013 at 1:27 am
i’m still not completely understanding the reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t deploy the .pkg that’s inside the ‘.app’.
i fetch the DMG from the same distribution3.html page that the above chap mentioned and deploy the PKG within. works fine as far as i’m aware. my students/staff are content.
am i missing something or setting myself up for a massive issue?
March 31, 2013 at 9:56 pm
You’re going to have problems with the auto-update mechanism (basically, it’s going to crash instead of checking for updates)
Try going into System Preferences > Flash and check for updates to see what I mean…
March 31, 2013 at 10:04 pm
Not too much of a problem, if you are not going to do updates via the Control panel, and instead run out the package from within the .dmg from a future update.
Make sure the prefs pane is disabled for users by deleting it, or moving to an Admin user’s PreferencePanes folder, perhaps.
Plus also add the following file
“/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/mms.cfg”
In this plain text file put the following two lines —
AutoUpdateDisable=1
SilentAutoUpdateEnable=1
March 31, 2013 at 10:15 pm
Here’s yet another place to download the full installers….
http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html