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FormLabs PreForm (3D printer driver and software)

Little bit of a niche request here :)

FormLabs is a 3D printer company. Their printers use their software, PreForm, to install drivers and create, modify, and print 3d renderings. The software is updated very frequently (usually few times a month) and my users want to be on the latest versions. The installer is freely available here: https://formlabs.com/tools/preform/

 

Note: the installer uncompresses into a handful of .exe and msi packages- seems relatively easy to put together. Bonjour is included in the installer and I believe it is required for network/cloud printing and the cloud print management console the newer models support. I could be wrong, but we weren't able to print a few years ago when I disabled the Bonjour installer. The print management console lets our users check the progress of long jobs from home (many jobs take 8-24 hours).

 

Thanks

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Comments

3 comments
Date Votes
  • Official comment

    Hey Scott, thank you for submitting this request.

    As of now, this software does not meet our requirements for inclusion in the Package Library. This could change should demand or popularity of the software increase. 
    If interested you could still create a package to silently deploy PreForm to your computers. The package that should be fairly easy to update when needed.

    Started by downloading the installer from FormLab’s download page. Looks like a traditional self-extracting executable.

    Just like you mentioned, inside contained the setup for PreForm, Bonjour, and miscellaneous installation files. If you run the downloaded installer, you’ll notice the installer they use is: Nullsoft Install System. With this information you can normally find documentation about the installer and if it has any standard silent install methods.

    Armed with this information, I loaded that installer into new PDQ Deploy package Install Step and used the /S parameter from Nullsoft’s documentation.

    However, if you deploy the package like this you may possibly experience the installer simply hanging and eventually timing out. This is because Bonjour is required to be installed. If you run the PreForm install from CMD using /S you’ll see PreForm begins installing, but then you get a popup to install Bonjour if your system is missing this prerequisite.  To get around this potential hang up, you can install Bonjour and Bonjour64 as Step 1 and 2. You can get the MSI installers from the PreForm installer by opening it as an archive. However, I copied the steps from our iTunes or iCloud packages. I did change the location of the Bonjour installers, but just copying the step from iTunes or iCloud will work without this change. From there it is a simple deploy to your target machines.

    Hopefully this helps! If you run into any issues, contact us at support@pdq.com

  • Thanks! The documentation was excellent and worked perfectly. I was using the preform.exe I extracted from preform_setup_xxx.exe for my install step, which was failing with a random error.  Hadn't thought of using the compressed setup file. 

    Also just learned you could copy/paste entire package steps...wasted so much time over the past year manually duplicating steps. gah!

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  • Hello, there is a newer Preform version 3.0.0. This procedure doesnt work anymore. Its still possible to extract the files from the exe file, but no command line parameter for silent is working and no msi files in the archive. Any idea`s?

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