BoxStarter Discussions Rss Feed

New Post: AutoLogin When No Password Is Set

kmcginnes — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 21:07:39 GMT

Hi, I've been using BoxStarter both at work and at home for the last few weeks. I'm really digging what you've got going on here. I'd love to share some of the extensions/helpers I've built to make BoxStarter a bit easier to work with and more powerful.

I did have a question. Does BoxStarter's AutoLogin function support some sort of flag to tell it that there is no password? Currently, when BS restarts my VM I have to be there to hit [enter] 3 times before it will continue. Fairly annoying, and I would imagine a somewhat common occurrence given that typically you secure the host OS, not the VM. I could be wrong on that one...

Thanks!
Kris

New Post: any sample packages in source control

fschwiet — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:21:40 GMT

Ok, I tried again today starting on a VM. Experimenting a bit more, I found it a lot more natural.

I did put what I'm using on source control if it might be a useful reference for others: https://github.com/fschwiet/fschwiet-boxstarter This takes awhile to test, so its still a work in progress.

New Post: any sample packages in source control

fschwiet — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:55:12 GMT

I've been trying to figure out Boxstarter. My previous efforts at repave automation live here (https://github.com/fschwiet/repave).

Anyhow, the first thing I observe is that new packages get created in the AppData/Roaming folder. I stumbled around trying to avoid this, as I really like to have everything in source control. Do you have any packages you use that are in source control? I'm curious how it works. I am going to try using it again, and maybe put the "Copy to thumb drive" result in source control.

New Post: Detecting pending reboots (on Windows 8)

mwrock — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:52:30 GMT

Thanks a bunch for the feed back. Will definitely look into this!

New Post: Detecting pending reboots (on Windows 8)

Kristinn — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:39:13 GMT

Hi Matt

Thank you for this brilliant tool!

Just wanted to mention a small problem I ran into, when testing BoxStarter on a (mostly) vanilla Windows 8 Pro laptop using an install script fairly not to far removed from the example on the project home page.

A previous install or Windows update had left a pending reboot flag but the Test-PendingReboot method was returning false, and the VS 2012 install subsequently failed. I saw you used a script from Brian Wilhite on TechNet Gallery that leverages WMI to query for reboot status as the basis for the method, for some reason it was not detecting the appropriate status.

What I did to get around this problem was to switch to using a Powershell module from Michal Gajda that I also found on TechNet, that uses the SystemInfo COM API to get the status. The check for pending reboots then became:

Import-Module PsWindowsUpdate
if(Get-WURebootStatus -Silent){Invoke-Reboot}

The PsWindowsUpdate module is actually very useful for manipulating Windows Update and I have created a Chocolatey package to install it to use with BoxStarter among other things.

I haven't had the opportunity to reproduce this problem on other Windows machines but I wanted to mention this if you or others would came across the same issue.

Kristinn

New Post: Is BoxStarter still relevant?

Maxmus — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:36:24 GMT

Hi Pete,

I do still have plans to expand boxstarter. You are right that alot of what was in boxstarter months ago got ported to Chocolatey and I will continue to contribute to Chocolatey where it makes sense. Hee are my more immediate plans:

- Make installations Reboot friendly. Chocolatey, correctly so, encourages packages not to force a reboot. However in a initial box setup scenario where you are installing a bunch of apps and might be installing updates as well, it is easy to end up in a situation where you need to reboot or else all attempted installs will fail. My goal is to detect pending reboots, Restart the machine and automatically log the user in and restartup the package. The user would provide their password in the boxstarter invokation. Boxstarter will store it in a special encrypted area and use it to log the user back in after restarts.

- Improved Logging to capture more info.

- A "One Click" app to invoke boxstarter. This will allow you to issue a simple command or click a link to invoke boxstarter.

- A website to make it easier to create boxstarter style packages (think ninite.com)

Matt

New Post: Is BoxStarter still relevant?

pmcevoy — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:37:35 GMT

I've been using BoxStarter for the past month, but I am starting to get confused if it is even relevant anymore, now that chocolatey 0.9.8.20 has been released. Many of the boxstarter helper functions are now available in native chocolatey.

Is there still a space for BoxStarter? Has it's life come to a (natural) end?

Cheers

Pete

New Post: Currently using BoxStarter (but prob not as initially intended?)

mwrock — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:16:50 GMT

Hi Jason,

I'm glad you are finding the boxstarter stuff useful! I think you should be safe from broken dependencies especially since you are using the boxstarter helpers directly from the module. Those should remain as is. The most volatile component right now is the boxstarter bootstrapper which you are circumventing altogether.

I'm hoping to eventually add functionality that will make using boxstarter simpler and will allow you to just have to manage a single file. Just been super busy lately.

Thanks for the feedback!
Matt

From: staxmanade
Sent: 11/30/2012 3:58 PM
To: matt@mattwrock.com
Subject: Currently using BoxStarter (but prob not as initially intended?)[BoxStarter:405213]

From: staxmanade

Hey Mat,

First I'd like to say thanks for the effort on this project and help on Chocolatey.

I wanted to open a quick discussion around how I'm currently using BoxStarter and get your feedback.

I have a single dev setup script, which I'd like to keep as a single script, and am currently loading up the boxstarter helpers (using the approach you do internally to boxstarter).

https://github.com/staxmanade/DevMachineSetup/blob/master/Bootstrap/BootIt.ps1

I may be a small minority, but would prefer not to have different files for my dev environment an quite like having it all specified in one big-ol script. (sort-of - i do shell out my powershell environment setup)

Would you mind taking a quick peek at what's there and how I'm using BoxStarter. Do you have any feedback, particularly in the realm of (when you make changes to box-starter is there anything I can do to avoid broken dependencies?)

Thanks