Installer Chaos

I spent part of the morning tracking down installer issues.  Here are some things I have learned:

1. If you have Windows Vista and User Access Control, there's a good chance that the installer may get caught on permissions problems.  I don't fully understand what's going on, but I don't think it's a coincidence that it is US GraphSim customers who see this.  

   Basically those DVDs, which went to press a little bit early, default to installing X-Plane on the C drive, which is not a generally accessible area.  UAC then makes some guesses and allows some but not all operations (or something equally weird) and the user gets stuck.

   I am still investigating, but I think the fix is to install to your home folder.

2. Some users have bad DVDs.  It happens, and I think it happens more now that we're dual layer.  There's also a variance in the sensitivity of drives - some users send us back damaged disks and they look bad but we can still read them.

   Tech support will tell you this, but if you can't install, one test is to simply copy the entire DVD to your hard drive; if the copy fails mid-way with "I/O error" or some other message about damaged media, call up tech support, they'll swap you a new disk.

   We try to find duplication facilities that do high quality work, but bad disks do happen.  Tech support should be able to make this right for you.

3. I've gotten a wide variety of weird reports on Linux - there are a lot of distros out there, so potentially a lot of versions of the OS code base.  For Linux users I strongly recommend the X-Plane Wiki, where we are trying to accumulate all of the fringe cases.