Unattended Install

Unattended Install Update

As there are a couple of major releases pending on the unattended install front, I thought it would be useful to let you all what's going on.

Firstly, the Tablet PC Unattended has just been deployed to the live download system. This includes all the additional components supplied with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (such as the pen & ink engine, journal viewer, notes etc.). At present this has been tested with the HP tc4200 tablet PC only, as it's all I have to test with. However, the only things missing from other models of laptops will be the touch screen driver and other similar hardware that we can easily add in.

It uses the same set of installation definitions - these are copied over from the vanilla XP install at regular intervals, so please just edit the XP ones, not both.

At present, I would describe the Tablet unattended as a stable beta, and I would certainly encourage its use wherever you come across a tablet PC so that we can build up a set of tablet specific hardware drivers.

Secondly, the XP 64 bit Unattended is due for its beta release next week. This will allow users to take advantage of 64bit OSs for their applications, but allowing us to retain the standard desktop that the unattended provides for.

It has been enitrely rewritten and uses WindowsPE as the initial setup OS instead of DOS. As things have changed significantly, expect some documentation to accompany the final release, however we would invite people to use it once released so that we can fix any bugs and add features based upon your feedback.

We will send further information about this next week once it has been released more widely.

Alex Lomas