zeniko's Setup is a tiny, yet functional setup application basing on Windows' INF Installer technology.
It provides hardly any possibilities for controlling or customizing the installation procedure. However it takes full advantage of Windows' own installation capabilities. Like this you can provide a complete and (almost) user friendly installation/uninstallation at the cost of only 10 KB!
Using Setup is in fact quite straight forward and not too difficult:
Make for your application a copy of template.inf and call it AppName.inf (or whatever your application's name is). Open this copy in your favorite editor and adapt it by following the instructions at the beginning of every section. In the end, make sure that you've replaced any occurence of "AppName" and "FileName" and that you have added all files to at least the [SourceDisksFiles] and one of the [Setup.Files.*] sections.
Copy Setup.exe and the .inf file created in Step 1 into the same folder as your application, zip that folder and distribute the package. Opening it in a program such as WinZip should now run Setup automatically.
Setup supposes the file setupapi.dll to exist on every target machine. In fact, there may be some few computers still running under Windows 95 who do not have this file installed. For all practical purposes however, this shouldn't be a problem.
You can run Setup in quiet mode (without user interaction) by using the /q command line parameter, and you can use Setup also as uninstallation routine (/u tries to uninstall an indicated .inf file):
Setup [ /q ] [ /u <filename> | /? ]
zeniko's Setup is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Note: zeniko's Setup was compressed by UPX (available at upx.sourceforge.net).
For comments, bug reports and suggestions write to: Simon Bünzli <zeniko@gmx.ch>.
For the current version of this program and for other programs of the same author visit: zeniko's webspace.
Copyleft © 2001 - 2003 Simon Bünzli (zeniko@gmx.ch) Product of zeniko's software.