How do i make my own installer?

[MadSkillzMan]

Hey guys. Im not sure if anyone has noticed my customize your xp desktop tutorial, but this is what im here about. I am checking out reshack and modifying a theme i saw online. A mac osx theme. It looks nice, id like to make it dark and contrasty tho. So anyways...i was thinking...make my own complete style or gui....it would involve WinMac, the dock bar, the Longhorn dock....possibly a few other little enhancements...such as trillian skin...media player skin.....

My quesiton is, how do i make an installer that compresses everything into one file....then the user can choose what they want installed.

WinMac is free, and im up for contacting the distributors of all these freeware programs to get permission to include them and such...

But basicaly, theyre all installers themselves...and the msstyles would have to be extracted to C:\Windows\resources

So how do i do this guys?

[Mr.Radar]

A great scriptable free installer is the NSIS installer previously from Nullsoft (now it's own SourceForge project independant of Nullsoft). I've used it before and it isn't bad (especially if you know a bit about programming).

Link (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/home/)

[Smartweb]

For this you might be better off writing your own installer in VB or something.

[MadSkillzMan]

Im familliar with the console C++, and im learning some simple VB right now...altho im the qb master...

[StaticXD00d]

Check out Paquet Builder. (http://www.gdgsoft.com/pb/index.aspx) It's a pretty good installer, and it's free without some features. Don't know if you need those features until you try it, but it definitely has LOTS of options and would probably cover what you need it to do.

[Antillian]

I recommend either Inno Setup Compiler or NSIS, NSIS being the one I use. If you don't know much about C++ programming, there is a great dialog editing wizard (similar to the one included in Inno) that you can download for NSIS called: HM NIS Edit.

[klingens]

I have a question about this "MACification" of Windows: will you replace explorer.exe? If not, what will you do with the Taskbar ?

[MadSkillzMan]

im experimenting with a few things...the explorer replacement ..my first option was litestep but thats kinda hard and it would have to be customized for everyone, and they would have to edit the config files....i am not familliar with it, so i dont know what is going to come of it.

Probably what i will do is simply skin the taskbar, and have the user set it to auto hide, so if you still need it, and cant function without it, ud still be able to use it.

[klingens]

You don't need users to edit anything with Litestep if you design your theme right, neither would they have to customize it:
http://o-t-s.sourceforge.net/