| Frequently
Asked Questions |
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| A.
Setup Capture uses shortcuts installed during installation to determine which EXEs to build. The
most common reason for this problem occurs if you instruct the
installer not to write any shortcuts during capture, or in some
case applications specifically do not install any shortcuts, for
these applications you need to manually edit the package.ini
file. |
| A:
People who are familiar with VMWare know there are significant
performance, memory, and disk impacts from using full machine
Virtualization. Thinstall is an application level Virtualization
solution, so the same impacts do not apply. The total disk
footprint for deploying Thinstall with an application is
approximately 400kb versus 4 Gigabytes needed to deploy a virtual
machine. Thinstall does not emulate or translate any application
instructions, so they run at full native speed, where with VMWare
you'll have a approximately 25% degradation in speed (hardware
Virtualization assistance can reduce this significantly). The
memory impact from running a Thinstalled will vary depending on how
many DLLs are loaded, but in general you should expect the
application to require approximately 2MB of RAM over the original
requirements. VMWare deployments will need approximately 256-512MB
of additional RAM to deploy a virtual machine. |
| |
| A. No,
Thinstall uses block-based
streaming to load only the required parts of an application
into memory as needed. A two gigabyte package can start executing
in less than a second and consume less than 10MB of RAM. The size
of the package has no correlation to the amount of memory or
startup time required. |
| A: You
can currently control access to Thinstalled package through a few
different mechanisms: |
| |
|
· Active Directory: In the
package.ini file, you can specify which users groups are able run a
specific package. Then using AD you can centrally add and remove
people to groups as needed. |
| |
|
· VB Scripts:
This allows you to "roll-your-own" system. VB Script gives you a
lot of power, and you can easily build hard-coded package times
with a simple script. We have posted a simple sample VB script
which will expire packages on a specific date, you could also
easily check for a specific machine registry key before allowing
the user to run the application. |
| http://thinstall.com/thintalk/viewtopic.php?t=205
|
| |
| VB
Script can easily call any COM component that is registered in the
virtual environment, so you can also write a C++ DLL that is called
and executed by vb script before the program starts and after it
shuts down. |
| |
| We
will also have a webserver based license management system
available in April 2007: |
|
http://thinstall.com/thintalk/viewtopic.php?t=207 |
| |
| See
Application Updates.
|
| A:
Using the ThinReg utility
|
| A:
Yes, Thinstall runs on Citrix and Terminal Server exactly the same
single-user Desktop environments. |
| A: See
the help topic "Sandbox Overview"
|
| A.
Isolation modes allow you to control what an application can read
and write on the local PC. Read isolation can allow system
installed and virtual Thinstall packages to run simutaneously
without conflicting with each other. Write isolation allows
Thinstall packages to believe they have global write permissions
while they really only modify the sandbox directory. More information about isolation
modes can be found here. |
| Thinstall
uses block based streaming to
decompress file data from disk directly into memory a block at a
time as requested by the application. Because data is not written
to disk and decompression is very efficient, the performance impact
for using compression is usually negligable. When loading
applications from slower media such as USB flash or network shares,
compression helps to accelerate loading times because less data
needs to be transfered. Because data is not cached or decompressed
to disk first, no extra disk space is required before, during, or
after executing Thinstalled applications. |
| A: Yes
- if you are deploying an application that requires .NET, there a
number of different options available. You can include .NET in your
package by capturing on a clean machine which doesn't have .NET
already installed (such as clean Win2k or XP SP1). If you start
with a clean machine, install .NET first and then do the capture
process the resulting application will use .NET from the host PC
instead of being included in the package. If you don't want to
capture the .NET Framework yourself, we have some pre-captured
projects you can use.
https://thinstall.com/thintalk/viewtopic.php?t=203 |
| A:
These flash demo shows how you can virtualize Internet Explorer
plugins/addins such as the Java Runtime Environment using Thinstall
VS. |
|
http://thinstall.com/demos/java_applet/ |
|
http://thinstall.com/demos/ica_activex/ |
| A:
Yes, Thinstall supports virtual services. If a captured package
installs a service, Thinstall will automatically start the service
as virtual service in the same user account as the logged in user
as needed by the application. |
| A:
Yes. |
| A:
Yes, if you premature clicked the "Post-install scan", you can just
hit the "back>>" button and it will take you to the
post-install scan step again and continue from there. The back
button also always to create multiple similar Thinstall projects in
the same session. |
| |
| Alternatively
you can also create projects from the command-line using the
snapshot tool like this: |
| 1.
snapshot.exe c:\snap1.dat |
| 2.
(install application) |
| 3.
snapshot.exe c:\snap2.dat |
| 4.
snapshot.exe c:\snap1.dat -diff c:\snap2.dat c:\myproject
|
| |
| A:
Thinstalled EXE files and some associated sandbox files will be
locked while the virtualized application is running and cannot be
deleted or altered. This also applied for any virtual child process
started by the parent process. Sometime application will
purposefully leave processes behind after they quit, for example
Office 2003 will start a process called ctfmon.exe and leave it
running even after Word or Excel have quit. You need to manually
kill these child processes before you can rebuild the application.
Luckily Thinstall gives you a tool to hunt down any Thinstalled
processes that might be running. This tool is "dll_dump.exe" can be
found in c:\program files\thinstall.vs and run likes this "dll_dump
*". If the application is locked on a user's desktop, Thinstall has
the ability to perform in-place
updates. |
| |