ge plugin installation

[Joerg R.]

hi,

i'm just wondering if there is already a way to download the actual
release of the ge plugin and deploy it on your companies machines? our
users can't install the plugin on their own because they lack
administrative rights (yeah xD)

all the best
Joerg

[Roman N]

Hi Joerg,

Currently no, but if you are a Google Earth Enterprise customer you
may want to contact enterprise support about this.

Related public issue here: http://code.google.com/p/earth-api-samples/issues/detail?id=32

Thanks,
Roman

[fraser (Earth API Guru)]

Hi Joerg,

Not to contradict Roman but I have managed to push the plugin out on a
windows domain of a few hundred clients like so.

1) Download the plug-in installer from: http://dl.google.com/earth/plugin/GoogleEarthPluginSetup.exe
2) Placed the exe on a read-only network share, i.e. \\server\netlogon
\GoogleEarthPluginSetup.exe
3) Created a Group Policy start-up script for the computer context,
the script is a simple bat file containing.

"\\server\netlogon\GoogleEarthPluginSetup.exe /silent /install"

4) Applied the group policy to an OU congaing all the machines for the
plug-in to be deployed to.

That's it, at the next power cycle the machines all had the plug-in
installed.
Obviously this was on a windows domain but I can't see why a similar
technique couldn't be used on other set-ups.
There are a few caveats to this, I would read this thread for more
info:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-earth-browser-plugin/browse_thread/thread/70264245163cf4a2/269efc46e3188f4a

Hope that helps.

Fraser.

[Joerg R.]

Hi Roman, Fraser,

thank you for your replies. Your solution works in most cases, i
guess. But not in mine ;/

There is one big problem left when using the installer: It loads the
current version from the internet. So clients w/o access to the
internet
are cut off.

I thought of manually sniffing the download location (while installing
on an admin machine), then get the full installation file and use this
as
source for deployment. Disadvantage would be the risk of running an
old version if the domain member machines are not updated frequently.

I suppose there is no official community offline installer package
available (yet?) ?

btw: thanks for this great piece of software

all the best
Joerg

[Barry Hunter]

I'm curious tho, if the machine is truly without an internet
connection, what use is the Plugin going to be?

It needs the internet to get imagery and any layers you enable. Also
the supporting API files are loaded from the internet, so would be
impossible to interact with a active plugin in a browser.

[JB'ing around]

Yep watch while the api downloads and it downloads the .exe to a
folder, then stop it from installing and you will have the .exe to
install.

When I played around with this I got "GoogleEarth-Win-
Plugin-5.0.11655.6079.exe "

And if you use Shell to install it on the users computer you can make
it totally transparent with something like this (i forget exactly)

Shell(install path "GoogleEarth-Win-Plugin-5.0.11655.6079.exe /S /v/
qn", vbHide)


This is just answering your query and takes nothing away from Romans
comments or the more interesting one of why a computer with no
internet connection wants to install it.

[Joerg R.]

ty for your help, worked like a charm

>the more interesting one of why a computer with no
>internet connection wants to install it.

i am trying to proxy the necessary internet connections to the cutoff
machines
so they don't have direct access to the internet but still can use the
ge plugin.

regards

[Roman N]

Be careful with using unofficial install methods. One reason is that
if the autoupdate mechanism isn't installed and Google makes a
breaking change to the Earth API JavaScript bootstrap, i.e. google.load
('earth', '1'), or imagery/content server, your users will get some
very unpredictable/broken behavior.

Just an FYI :)

Thanks,
Roman