March 18, 2024

Installer is a free crossplatform installation application which is based on the Dynamic Windows programming toolkit.

Installer has had a long history, version 1.x (AKA Installer/2) was an OS/2 only program which had several incarnations, and at one point there was a possible merger with what is now WarpIN. I'd like to thank Daniele Vistalli and Dimitris Michelinakis for the help on the initial OS/2 versions of Installer.

Later it branched and a wxWidgets based version of it (wxInst) was released for Windows and Unix. Since wxWidgets was not usable on OS/2 at that time I needed something to better deal with the resizing of the SciTech installer and I wrote Dynamic Windows to fill this void. Shortly afterwards Achim Hasenmüller convinced me to use REXX to script the installer. The first REXX and DW based version was used in my PMBitchX and Innotek's Flash 4 products. Thanks to Achim for the help with VisualAge C calling conventions.

Soon all the OS/2 code was removed from the REXX and DW based installer and with the help of Regina REXX it was up and running on Windows as well. Thanks to Mark Hessling for his work on Regina REXX. This was the Installer 2.x series.

Finally after years of neglect I resurrected the Unix code from wxInst and merged it into the current code base and Installer now runs successfully on Unix as well.

Installer is currently being tested on OS/2, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. A MacOS X port is in the works.

Here are some screenshots of Installer 3.0 in action.

Warp

Running on OS/2 Warp Server

Windows

Running on Windows XP

Unix

Running on FreeBSD