Quick and dirty observations/work-arounds for getting ALUI 6.5 installed on Vista/Tomcat/Oracle Express

1) GUI installer doesn't give you the option to do Java install
2) GUI installer can't find W3SVC for .NET install, even if service is running, and installer is run w/ admin privs
3) Silent Install partially fails with non-fatal error messages: 

No entry found: MakeExecutableAction_zg_ia_sf.jar
                          Status: ERROR

Install Uninstaller:      AquaLogic Interaction (Install All Uninstaller Components)
                          Status: ERROR
                          Additional Notes: ERROR - Failure to install Uninstaller executable: java.lang.NullPointerException

Some poking around on the Web leads me to believe this is, oddly, due to somebody @ HQ FTPing installer back and forth between machines using ASCII mode.  See Zero G forums here:

http://community.zerog.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=5912;hl=makeexecutableaction_zg_ia_sf.jar

Not sure if these Error messages are causing Installer to give up on some crucial steps or not, but lot's of things are missing if you just run silent install.  (Most of the config files don't get laid down, there's no pthome.xml, etc).

Anyhow, luckily, the installer leaves register.bat laying around buried in the uninstall directory. Be sure to run it with Admin privs, or important things like setting registry entires for PT_HOME and PORTAL_HOME won't run successfully.  You can find bat file at: <ALUI_HOME>\uninstall\register\register.bat

After running register.bat, everything appears to get installed nicely except for the Configuration Manager.  Not sure why this isn't getting installed.  Possibly because documented option for it in silent.properties in the "install.product.component.list" setting.  Since config manager doesn't get installed, you'll need to edit configuration.xml by hand.  Use cryptoutil.bat to encrypt passwords.

4) Portal Startup diagnostic check doesn't recognize Vista as a support Windows platform.  This could be fixed at the code level by changing com.plumtree.uiinfrastructure.util.Platform to add a check for osname containing "vista" like so:
//snip
	if(osname.indexOf("windows") > -1)
        {
            if(osname.indexOf("vista") > -1)
            {
                platform = WIN32_JAVA;
                m_bIsSupported = false;
            } else
//snip

Rather than monkey around with re-compiling code back into portal, I just hacked it by setting the os.name system property when I launch the JVM.  For instance, I added the following to my tomcat startup.bat script:

set JAVA_OPTS=-Dos.name="windows 2003"

and the edited the line that invokes the JVM in the portal diagnostic.bat script to read like this:
em Start the command-line version tool

"%PT_HOME%\%JRE_PATH%\bin\java.exe" -Dos.name="windows 2003" -Xms16m -Xmx512m -cp "%LIB_DIR%\diagrun.jar" com.plumtree.diagtool.diagnostic_net %*

5) I'm running Oracle Express on my box.  If you want to use Oracle Express, remember 2 things:  1) Install the Universal version so you get UTF charsets.  2) Run the load_seed_data.sql script from command line SQL*PLUS, not through the web.  For some reason (charcter encoding when using the web?) inserts into ptobjectproperties get read a 256 instead of 255 chars when using the web.  This causes script to bomb out w/ exceed max column size.

6) Frustratingly, the ALUI Logging Utilities installer completely refuses to run on Vista.  Odd that the other Zero G installers run fine, but the logging utils don't.  In any case, I've been flying w/out help of PTSpy :(