installing 6.0 m090 alongside existing 6.0 m010 installation

[naglists]

Hiya,

I am attempting to install 6.0 m090 alongside an existing 6.0 m010
installation but the installer is only providing me the option to upgrade
the m010 installation. How do I force a full installation?

I read the install.pdf provided w/m090 (which was apparently updated last
for m040) but it didn't have anything specific about doing this other than
it mentioned both full and upgrade installation possibilities.

What am I missing?

--
Paul Nagai

[ebenton]

Just SWAG-ing here. If you are running setup.exe, does the MSI give you more options? Or vice versa?

[jsillari]

Paul:

Did you try specifying an alternate path for the installation?

John Sillari
Chief Technologist
Dayton T. Brown, Inc.

[naglists]

Hi Ed, Hi John,

Thanks for the ideas.

Ed, I tried running the MSI ... no joy ... same dilemma. And, John, way
before I can choose an alternate directory (which is what we have been
doing since way back deep into the 4.x era), I am presented with an Upgrade
or Cancel choice. It gets worse. I just uninstalled everything, installed
m090 clean, and am now trying to install m010 ... it fails utterly stating
it is unable to "upgrade" m090.

Sigh. This could be bad. Opening a case w/PTC. Surely there's a command
switch that will ignore a pre-existing install.

[naglists]

Support just confirmed that this is part of the product specification of
Arbortext Editor 6.0.

I can't tell you how much this is going to impact our ability to Arbortext
Editor. Wow. Just wow.

[naglists]

Am I the only one who missed this way back when 6.0 rolled out or was this
"feature" buried or not even mentioned?

[GarethOakes]

Welcome to the brave new world! 🙂

We have shifted to using Virtual Machines for all our dev/test environments now, eg. one for production (6.0 M010 in your case), one for staging (6.0 M010 soon to be M090), one for dev (6.0 M090) …

-Gareth

[jsillari]

Gareth:

Virtualization is cheap. Excellent. Any issues with licensing via Flex?

John Sillari
Chief Technologist
Technical Services Division
Dayton T. Brown, Inc.

On Aug 21, 2013, at 14:35, "Gareth Oakes" <goakes@gpslsolutions.com<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline&quot;=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:goakes@gpslsolutions.com">>">mailto:goakes@gpslsolutions.com>> wrote:

Welcome to the brave new world! 🙂

We have shifted to using Virtual Machines for all our dev/test environments now, eg. one for production (6.0 M010 in your case), one for staging (6.0 M010 soon to be M090), one for dev (6.0 M090) …

-Gareth

[naglists]

I am using some virtualization for testing and, it turns out, may be
getting additional hardware for testing as well. But unless all our authors
are provided a virtual environment in addition to their workstations, it
does not ease my migration planning headaches induced by this inability to
install two versions of 6.0.

[GarethOakes]

Good question John 🙂

Arbortext 6.0 applications which are using a node-locked (fixed) license won't work over an RDP or Windows Terminal Services connection. You can get around this in essentially one of two ways:

1. Use alternative remote connection software such as VNC.
2. Upgrade your license to a concurrent (floating), or registered user license. These configurations will require a license server.

We avoid most of the problems on our developer machines because they are using desktop VMware hosted on their own machines. VMware on the desktop uses a direct console emulation to connect to the VM's screen/keyboard and therefore avoids triggering the FlexNet RDP issues. The same is true of VirtualBox, I believe, but is NOT true of Windows Virtual PC which does use an RDP link even on the desktop.

-Gareth

[GarethOakes]

Hi Paul,

A trick we used to use on APP (not sure if it works so well for Editor or not).

1. Install 6.0 M010.
2. Copy the entire 6.0 M010 program folder to somewhere else as an exact copy.
3. Upgrade 6.0 M010 to 6.0 M090.
4. Restore the original 6.0 M010 folder and see if you can still load Editor 🙂

-Gareth

[naglists]

Following your suggestion to brute-force a pair of installs, I think what
I'd have to do to end up with an m010 and an m090 pair is this:

Install m010 to:
c:\win\ptc\editor60m090

Copy that folder to some "holding" location.

Install m090 allowing it to upgrade m010.

Then copy the "holding" folder back to this folder:
c:\win\ptc\editor60

And see if both ran successfully? Is that what you're suggesting?

I already launch editor.exe via a batch file. I already know how to
regsrv32 the WDK dlls (and allegedly Editor should register itself). What
else might I need to think about?

[naglists]

That appears to work ... Each time m010 runs after m090 runs and vice
versa, I am presented with this:

[A31568] Arbortext Editor has detected that this version is no longer
configured correctly.
To automatically correct this problem, Arbortext Editor requires elevated
permissions.
After you select OK, Windows will ask you to confirm the permissions.

But clicking OK seems to work. Pretty sure that is Editor registering
itself.

Phew. Some small sigh of relief. Still, I'm sure this isn't supported but
... tra la.

[naglists]

Thanks, Gareth!

[ptc-4875135]

Paul,

You can disable that COM prompt, but now you're really tempting fate. Especially starting in 6.0, there are a number of UIs that rely on including an Editor ActiveX control embedded in a dialog - for example, the Text Entity and Tag Template dialogs, or the DITA Resource Manager/Image tab. If the wrong COM process is registered, some bad things can happen.

With that having been said, you can tell Editor to not worry about COM registration by setting the APTNOCOMCHECK environment variable to some value. But you probably shouldn't.

Chris

Chris Nitchie
(734) 330-2978
chris.nitchie@oberontech.com
www.oberontech.com
Follow us:

[ptc-4875135]

Now that I think of it, a better solution would be to run the various versions of Editor from a batch file and call

editor.exe -RegServer

before launching the program proper (via editor.exe or editor.exe -styler). This will 'manually' register the given executable as the COM server, and then it won't nag you about it when you start up.

Chris

Chris Nitchie
(734) 330-2978
chris.nitchie@oberontech.com
www.oberontech.com
Follow us:

[naglists]

So I like the suggestion, Chris. However (and this has nothing to do with
Editor, it's all Windows 7) I have to run the shortcut or batch file as an
Administrator or I get a longer series of dialogs.

Specifically, with the command added, if I run as administrator, Windows 7
confirms I want to run it as an Administrator, and then Editor loads.

If I do not run it as an administrator, then with the command, the initial
com registration fails but then when Editor runs (not attempting to
specifically register itself), it alerts that it is not configured properly
and asks to make changes, on OK, Windows 7 requests confirmation of running
as an Administrator.

Without the command (editor -RegServer) and without running as
Administrator, I get just the "not configured" prompt, and then Editor
loads.

So it's a choice ... do you want authors to confirm they want to run Editor
as an Administrator, or to confirm it needs reconfiguring after a switch
between m010 and m090. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Oh, and I am able to launch both m010 and m090 and have them running at the
same time. No testing beyond launch, so I don't know if there are issues
that would develop doing more than just launching the app (not even opening
a file).


Anyhow, thanks, Chris, as I said, I like that suggestion. I am not sure
which error / confirmation the authors will prefer to see, but I'll let
them decide ... I never know how they're going to think.



On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 5:15 PM, Chris Nitchie <chris.nitchie@oberontech.com<br/>> wrote:

> Now that I think of it, a better solution would be to run the various
> versions of Editor from a batch file and call
>
> editor.exe -RegServer
>
> before launching the program proper (via editor.exe or editor.exe
> -styler). This will 'manually' register the given executable as the COM
> server, and then it won't nag you about it when you start up.
>
> Chris
>
> *Chris Nitchie*
> (734) 330-2978
> chris.nitchie@oberontech.com
> www.oberontech.com
> Follow us: <">http://www.linkedin.com/company/oberon-technologies>
> <">https://twitter.com/oberontech> <">https://www.facebook.com/oberontech>
> <">http://www.oberontech.com>
>
> On Aug 21, 2013, at 8:13 PM, Chris Nitchie <chris.nitchie@oberontech.com>
> wrote:
>
> Paul,
>
> You can disable that COM prompt, but now you're *really* tempting fate.
> Especially starting in 6.0, there are a number of UIs that rely on
> including an Editor ActiveX control embedded in a dialog - for example, the
> Text Entity and Tag Template dialogs, or the DITA Resource Manager/Image
> tab. If the wrong COM process is registered, some bad things can happen.
>
> With that having been said, you can tell Editor to not worry about COM
> registration by setting the APTNOCOMCHECK environment variable to some
> value. But you probably shouldn't.
>
> Chris
>
> *Chris Nitchie*
> (734) 330-2978
> chris.nitchie@oberontech.com
> www.oberontech.com
> Follow us: <">http://www.linkedin.com/company/oberon-technologies>
> <">https://twitter.com/oberontech> <">https://www.facebook.com/oberontech>
>

[GarethOakes]

> Oh, and I am able to launch both m010 and m090 and have them running at the same time.
> No testing beyond launch, so I don't know if there are issues that would develop doing more
> than just launching the app (not even opening a file).

The COM stuff is where the side-by-side Editor will come unstuck. The Windows COM registry only allows you to register one instance of a COM object at a time. So if you started M090 first then M010 will use the M090 COM object in situations such as Chris described.

Glad to hear you're making progress though 🙂

-Gareth

[ptc-4875135]

Yeah, I totally forgot about the Windows 7 security stuff. I havne't had to run two versions simultaneously in a while; when I did, I used the APTNOCOMCHECK trick.

Chris

Chris Nitchie
(734) 330-2978
chris.nitchie@oberontech.com
www.oberontech.com
Follow us:

[naglists]

I will sleep on it, but I do not think it will be hard to declare an end to
supporting dual versions running simultaneously. Would there be a way to
test from the batch file whether the OTHER version is loaded or not? For
example, if an author launches m090 but m010 is loaded, can I detect that
and "gracefully" (as gracefully as one can in DOS 🙂 exit?


On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 5:46 PM, Chris Nitchie <chris.nitchie@oberontech.com<br/>> wrote:

> Yeah, I totally forgot about the Windows 7 security stuff. I havne't had
> to run two versions simultaneously in a while; when I did, I used the
> APTNOCOMCHECK trick.
>
> Chris
>
> *Chris Nitchie*
> (734) 330-2978
> chris.nitchie@oberontech.com
> www.oberontech.com
> Follow us: <">http://www.linkedin.com/company/oberon-technologies>
> <">https://twitter.com/oberontech> <">https://www.facebook.com/oberontech>
> <">http://www.oberontech.com>
>
>

[ptc-4875135]

Paul,

Check out the 'tasklist' command. Some good info here:

[naglists]

Thanks. That'll work.


On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 6:30 PM, Chris Nitchie <chris.nitchie@oberontech.com<br/>> wrote:

> Paul,
>
> Check out the 'tasklist' command. Some good info here:
>
>
>
> <">https://twitter.com/oberontech> <">https://www.facebook.com/oberontech>
> <">http://www.oberontech.com>
>
>

[ebenton]

We have had problems using virtual PCs in that our network sees any new virtual PC as unauthorized and blocks it from accessing our intranet. One must then get the virtual PC authorized. Bureaucracy ensues.

[naglists]

In the end, tasklist didn't work for me. It could not detect which version
was running (or my tasklist-fu was too weak and I couldn't make it do so).
I found and got wmic to work. This must be run with administrator
privileges or the commandline value (the path) is not always returned. If
started from a batch file, it may be. If started from a shortcut that calls
that batch file, it is not ... unless the admin privs are present. Note the
path in the second find on the wmic line must match YOUR installation path
for the test-for, other version. There is a reciprocal set of commands at
the top of the m010 batch file that obviously look for the m090 install
path, not the m010 as this code does.


rem ADD THIS TO the top of the m090 batch file:
echo off
wmic process where name="editor.exe" get commandline | find /I /N
"editor.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "editor60\bin" 2>NUL
if %ERRORLEVEL%==1 goto startm090
@echo.
@echo.
@echo.
@echo.
@echo Editor 6.0 m010 is running and must be closed before starting m090.
@echo.
@echo Press Enter to exit.
@pause
exit
:startm090
rem the rest of my batch file follows ....


Thanks everyone.