Having read gthubron's post about a beginners guide to the GP2X and reading that he had problems getting games installed, it occurred to me that perhaps what we need is an installer for homebrew and the like.

Anyway, after a quick search on the net I uncovered a freeware installer package called SetupStream, which has a pretty easy to use wizard style interface. I managed to knock up a working installer for Liquid War in about 10 minutes (including the learning curve!). I seems to work really well.

Now for the (slightly) bad news. The installer adds about 1.2 meg onto the total size of the package using its maximum compression settings, but RARing the installer brings it back down by another 700kb meaning its just over half a meg bigger than the original archive.

Considering the ease this will allow people to install and deinstall homebrew I think the overhead is worth it, EvilDragon however might disagree since he probably pays bandwidth costs!

Anyone else have any views?

Homebrew games are just drag and drop (most of the time. Super Tux was weird :\).
Why do we need installers? :|

The trip up here is "most of the time", take for example Fenix stuff needs runtimes, in the right place...This is where alot of newbies fall down. An installer could put them in the right place. I'm not saying that we should have installers for everything, just the hard to install stuff.

Another good example is the person that posted an "easy to install" quake into the archives recently...This would have been better and far simpler done as an installer.

I actually had a similar idea, after reading the same post, but I then forgot about it 3 seconds later
A simple installer, designed for the GP2X, in a similar manner to MSI files in windows would be great. You could even make them autorun, so that the process would be along the lines of:

1. Download game/application
2. Copy straight to the root directory of the SD card
3. Put in GP2X and turn on
4. Installer autoruns
5. Follow the on screen instructions, selecting the appropriate settings (Or just bash A until it is installed)
6. Launch program

Something like this would probably work best in a new GUI, with a proper menu structure for browsing programs.

The actual installer program could be made to autorun whenever the GP2X is turned on, or run manually. When the installer is run it could do the following processes:

1. Scan SD root/current directory for archives with a certain name format (eg, appname.gp2x.zip). If non are found close.
2. If multiple archives are found it will display a list of installers, otherwise it goes straight to the next step
3. Open the archive and look for installer.ini and extract bits of information. If no installer.ini file is found, just ask the user where they want to extract the files.
4. Use information to display custom prompts, which the user completes and use this to install the app
5. Once finished ask the user if they want to delete the installer or not

For people not wanting to use the installer they could just open the archive and install as normal.

Wouldn't a batch/script file (either for Windows or the GP2X) work just as well? Run a script on the GP2X, it moves the files to the areas it deems most common.

What you're referring to is something like the Blizzard installer that I used to use with my Nokia 6600 for...ahem..certain games

The installer I downloaded was for Windows really, but had the advantage that it stored the deinstallation script in the destination directory (i.e. the sd card). That way, you deinstalled from the add remove programs menu. People are more familiar with this sort of installation, and are comfortable with it in my view. Hence why I picked a Windows installer. Of course, this wouldn't cater for our Linux friends out there.




It would do the same job, yes....The problem is in my view, that people like things to be the same, they don't like change. But if there was a standard script/batch file that could be adapted for each installation that might do.

Don't forget though, that some people really do have problems even copying things to a memory card (my father in law springs to mind!). These are the sort of people that want the easy life.

NSIS is small and open-source. Its somewhere on sourceforge.

I looked at that, but its script based and therefore more difficult to configure. As I said, I got an installer working for Liquidwar inside 10 minutes.

If you don't mind me saying, you may be going about this the wrong way.
I was thinking of a slightly different approach.

Say somebody came up with a really nice application with a simple interface that reflected the GP2X (and was available for all platforms), all you'd need to do is ask that developers include a certain file in their archives that describes which folders are needed and what files from the archive go where.
Current peeps ignore the file and carry on as normal, "n00bs" open the archive within the app and click "install".

The app would then be a file manager for the '2X. You could extend it as a download manager (as I think there was a previous discussion).

And there you have it.
The only real advantage (apart from being able to tell people there's an "iTunes-like" frontend) is that it won't increase the size of the distributions beyond a few bytes.

What would those of us who don't use Windows do when we got an installer?

Have a lobotomy like the rest of us Windows users?

Seriously though, I did mention that earlier myself...It never occurred to me until I was posting...Still this is what discussion forums are for....discussing.

Just so we're clear.....I'm right...the rest of you are wrong.



See now, this is a nice idea...but it would need someone to write it in the first place. If I had even a moments peace from my wife and kids i'd do it, especially since i'm a qualified programmer, but the little spare time I get is spent either on ebay, or my GP2X! Besides its been a few years since I went near C++, actually thats not true...I downloaded the source of an Elite rewrite which had been abandoned, in the hope to get some time to myself to get it working...guess what....yep...no time!

you could just educate yourself a bit on how things operate and have a look through the readme. They almost always have instructions on where things go and what to do. On the chance they don't, the forums should have your answers.

I don't like the idea of over simplification. This just makes people ignorant to whats going on with their gp2x's. All of the basic things you could do on your gp2x are easy. When looking to do something beyond placing files in their correct directories, its not too hard to learn and people are usually more willing to help with these problems and have in the past. Our forums are rather comprehensive when it comes to getting releases working.

Edit: installers would take more time then dragging files over. In addition, if a program had additional files that could not be released with the program (bios files/roms/data files etc) people would be lost. Manually placing your files on the card keeps you organized and you don't have to worry whether or not the person that wrote the script conforms to your personal directory structure preferences. With an installer people become really lazy.

Get motivated! Your gp2x is a blast.

This isn't directed at anyone but those who don't know how to do things properly yet..

Its not me that has the problem, my card is chocca full with stuff I have installed by hand, but it IS a problem with newbies, in fact this thread was motivated by a newbie with exactly this problem posting TODAY.

As for personal preferences to directory structures, two things spring to mind...

1) More often than not, you are limited by the author as to where you can put things, nothing will change this other than the author of the software

2) You can change the directory the software is installed to by merely editing the destination when given the chance by the installer.

I disagree about people being lazy regarding installers, it keeps you more organised not less. Personally, I think we NEED something like this, otherwise the tag the GP has at the moment of being hard to setup is going to stay, and ultimately hurt it badly. People will only try so much before giving up, and selling their precious GP2x on eBay.

The only people that it might hurt are those that dont want to put any time what so ever into learning how to do things. As it stands this isnt psp or nintendo ds. I don't think GPH or many of the people around here expect it to become something like that. I surely would not mind an installer but I dont think I would like it. I like poking things around and I ususally write scripts to launch things from this place or that all over my card in an oh so odd organization. For me, a program that could easily create and edit scripts would be cool, but it would have to have an option to type in your own additions though. That way, if you were doing something other then over-clocking or tweaking the lcd you could easily use that program's specific commands to execute the script with the same intentions of writing it yourself. I think this would help bridge the gap after the initial learning curve is overcome.

But as I see it, the whole problem is that people become frustrated and ulitmately give up because its not as simple as they had hoped. Wite Noiz had a great idea which would satisfy everyone, however it would need someone to write it, and it would probably need a spec that everyone had agreed first.

Anyone up for this? As I said, i'd take this on myself if I had time, but my family commitments mean that i've not got a hope in hell of doing it.

"Do you agree to these terms and conditions?
*wall of scrollable text*
Press A for yes...........Press B for no"

XD

Cheers.
I'm up for it, but I have too much on my plate to take it on now. My idea goes slightly further than that, but I'm kind of hoping to develop some of it myself once Platoons is mature enough.

You'd make a lot of newbies very very happy!

We'll see.
Once Platoons is more playable, I'll consider a short spell of experimentation on this, if nobody else has.

Uhmm... Even microsoft realized that a simple full directory copy should be enough to install an app. That's called by them "XCopy installs" and its one of the principles of .NET/C#. That was borrowed from Mac computers, and was first on the NeXT OS. I'm happy about having each app self contained in a folder, inside my GP2X. And i think the unzip/copy to SD card/run its good enough even for newbies.