Psychopy Deployment

Other
1

Hello.

I am having troubles deploying Psychopy on our network. The guides I have seen for classrom administration leaves nothing to actually deploy.

Is there an msi and guide for a network environment? I would appreciate a speedy response and our users are so far two weeks without Psychopy.

Regards

George

2

Really hard to tell what you’re aiming for here or how you run your software admin usually. How did you push other software on to your machines?

Options I’ve seen in use are (my own dept has used options #1 and #2 and I know others have used #3):

  1. you install PsychoPy in the normal way on single machine and then disk image that to the others in the lab. I expect this is what most computer labs do
  2. you install to your single machine, and hack it (e.g. remove the psychopy python lib and point to a new copy on a shared network drive) then push a disk image out to your machines. This has advantage that you can amend the psychopy library on the network drive without having to re-image your computers, but it depends how resilient the network is to lots of concurrent accesses when students all fire up PsychoPy together.
  3. you install to some central application server, like AppV

No, not yet. I don’t know all the different ways a sys admin will want to customise their install. I created one for my own dept

I don’t think that’s our fault!

bw
Jon

3

Hi Jon,

Perhaps I should state exactly my problem.

Thus far, I have repackaged the Psychopy and deployed a msi and got it working. The problem for some users is the applications needs to run for the first time and failing.

Regards

George

4

So your question isn’t about network installs but about some machines in your lab not working?

OK, well it’s still impossible to know why from just saying it’s “failing”. There’s a documentation page about troubleshooting that shows you how to get out an error message on a machine where the app doesn’t start. Could you try and get an error message to send us?

http://www.psychopy.org/troubleshooting.html#the-application-doesn-t-start

1 Like
5

Well I was thinking either, start all over again as not to get drawn in my deployment discussion or fix the problem.

I have reghosted a machine and captured the configuration screen but it went through for me using an admin account. For some users it fails.

.

Also wish to disable the update popup

6

I’ve never seen the dialog box that Windows is configuring PsychoPy. No idea where that comes from! :-/ Anyone else know what that is? I still think it would be worth trying to launch from the command line, as in the troubleshooting guide, to see if an error message is cropping up that you can’t see.

For getting rid of the auto-update checks there are few places to hack this option:

  • easy way is to change the preferences Windows.spec files before deploying to the user machines but this will only affect new users (it’s setting the default option before they have a user prefs file)
  • more forceful would be to hack the code within the loading of PsychoPy to override the user prefs. You could do this in …/psychopy/init.py by adding a line at the bottom like:
prefs.connections['checkForUpdates'] = False

(that isn’t tested but it’s something like that)
If that works then you can go to the preferences pane and make sure that it has changed from your previous preference.

It would be good to have some settings like this that could be overridden by some admin mode but I’m not sure how to do that optimally.