i-Installer Preferences

When you click the Preferences... submenu of the i-Installer menu, you will be presented with a small panel. This panel contains a tabbed view with three tabs:

• Tasks & Processes
• Locations
• View
• Other

The Tasks & Processes tab

Ask for thinning at close of package

When selected, you are presented with an option to thin a package when you close it. It will be thinned until its size shrinks below a predetermined size and large files are removed first.

Thin Level

This is the size to which packages will shrink when you thin them. Values entered here can be followd by kB for kiloBytes, MB for MegaBytes and GB for GigaBytes.

Disable all network access

This will disable all network access for i-Installer. This will be the preferred setting on systems which are not connected in some way to the internet. When network access is not disabled, you can set the following options:

Try to disable the retrieval of contents cached by intermediaries

It has come to my attention that there are caches that do not operate properly. As a result, i-Installer will sometimes be provided with outdated cached versions of its contents. i-Installer will notice this because when the contents have changed, for most contents a MD5 checksum will be calculated and this MD5 will be invalid. i-Installer will normally refuse to work with contents with invalid MD5 checksums. This flag tries to disable the use of caching as much as possible be adding certain headers to the HTTP-requests i-Installer sends. Very badly behaving caches will ignore this of course, and in that case you will be out of luck.

Auto-download missing contents

When parts of a package are missing and are needed for what you are trying to do, fetch them automatically. This is the main interesting feature of i-Installer and it normally should be turned on.

Fast network

When this is turned on, i-Installer will perform downloads for missing parts in parallel and it will not warn that a check for update on all your packages is slow. This is a matter of taste and experience. I do not know what fast is and what slow and you need to experiment with this setting to find out which of the two download behiours you like. The warning about time consuming checking for updates is linked to this, which is not always correct, but close enough (and a separate button would require UI changes as the Preferences panel is full)

Check GPG signatures

Check GPG signatures of the i-Package and its contents. Currently, though this works in principle, it is not recommended because the key servers have so far proven to be slow and sometimes unreliable.

Keep files with invalid MD5 checksums.

Normally, when a file has an invalid MD5 checksum, it will be deleted from the package. You can keep it for inspection by checking this option.

The Locations tab

Remotely Openened i_packages default Save Directory

Here are packages stored that you open through the Known Packages menu or the New from URL... submenu. You are advised not to use a location with whitespace or special characters in the path. While i-Installer should be able to handle this without problem, the packages contain scripts that run at the Unix environment where special action needs to be taken to make sure the script handles special file names well. Since that depends on the package author, and since a mistake is easily made, it is best not to use whitespace or special characters (including for instance ; & : $) in the i-Package location. When you change this value, i-Installer will automatically try to move the packages from the old to the new location and it will also adapt a possible background check timed execution command.

Startup i-Packages Directory URL

This is the location of the source of the Known Packages menu. If this is changed while the Known Packages window is open, the Known packages window will be updated immediately.

Max i-Directory Descend

An i-Directory may contain links to other i-Directories. This number sets the level of descend. The larger the number, the more directories are searched, but the slower the first menu-access will be.

Display duplicate i-Package names in i-Directory listing

When selected: Display all packages with the same filename part. Normally, no more than one such a package will be displayed (the first found) as i-Package file name parts (the last part of the URL) are supposed to be unqiue.

The View tab

This tab shows you which tabs in the i-Package window will be visible by default. These settings are used when the i-Package itself does not contain these settings. See the description on The i-Package Window for more information.

The Other tab

Show Startup Panel

Deselect this to completely get rid of the startup splash screen (startup panel). When selected, the splash screen is shown at startup, unless you are starting i-Installer by opening an i-Package (double click or drag and drop).

Log Level

Set the level of logging and debug messages generated. These messages can be seen in main window of Console.app. A level of 0 is fine unless you are experiencing problems. This will not influence the normal progress report of i-Installer operations which is shown in it's own windows.

Check packages for updates when i-Installer is not running

When you turn this on, a line will be added to your personal timed execution setup (crontab for unix geeks) that will be executed, even when i-Installer.app is not running. The line that is added checks all i-packages in your default Save Directory location (see above). If any of these have been remotely updated, a message will be mailed by 'timed execution' services. This assumes that mail on your machine is working properly and that 'timed execution' services are activated.

(If you are fluent in unix, you can analyse the line in crontab and adapt your crontab settings to only check certain packages or packages in other locations on your disk.)

Check package dependencies

This sets the type of dependency checks that are performed on install of a package. Default is that only the required dependendencies are checked. You can set this to All, but note that dependencies that are only recommended as opposed to required may be circular, so you will get warnings in any case.

The Environment tab

When you check the checkbox, the entries in the table view below influence the environment variables that i-Installer passes on to subprocesses. Full entries are added to the environment for subprocesses, replacing entries if they already exist. Entries without a value have the effect that they block (remove) entries if they exist. The default entries set a default PATH and remove any MANPATH variable.

Warning: messing around with the environment may really damage the workings of programs like i-Installer. Be careful.

Settings changed here do not influence other programs, it only has an effect on i-Installer.