Computer Installation Jargon

There's so much fear about installations and there needn't be if you follow the rules

Silent installation

Installation that does not display messages or windows during its progress. "Silent installation" is not the same as "unattended installation", though it is often improperly used as such.

Unattended installation

Installation that is performed without user interaction during its progress or, in a stricter sense, with no user present at all, except eventually for the initial launch of the process. An installation process usually requires a user who "attends" it to make choices at request: accepting an EULA, specifying preferences and passwords, etc.

In graphical environments, installers that offer a wizard-based interface are common. However these installers may also provide command line switches that allow performing unattended installations.

Answer file

Some unattended installations can be driven by a script providing answers to the various choices such as the answer file which can be used when installing Microsoft Windows on a large number of machines.

Self installation

Unattended installation, without the need of initial launch of the process (i.e. Vodafone Mobile Connect USB Modem or Huawei E220's Mobile Partner software that self-installs from the USB port).

Headless installation

Installation performed without using a monitor connected to the destination computer (in particular, on a computer with no video output at all). This can be an (attended) installation performed from another machine connected via LAN or via a serial cable.

Unattended and headless installations are common tasks for system administrators.

Clean installation

Given the complexity of a typical installation there are many factors that may interfere with its successful completion. In particular files that are leftover from old installations of the same program or an unstable situation of the operating system may all act to prevent a given program from installing and working correctly.

An installation performed in absence of such interfering factors (which may vary from program to program) is called a clean installation. In particular, a clean operating system installation can be performed by formatting its destination partition before the actual installation process.

Flat installation

An installation of a program performed from a copy (called a flat copy) of its original media contents (mostly CDs or DVDs) to a hard drive, rather than directly from the media.

This may help in some situations where the target machine isn't able to cope with random access reads from CD/DVD at the same time as performing the CPU-intensive tasks often required by an installation, or where the target machine does not have an appropriate physical drive.

Network Installation

An installation of a program from a shared network drive. This may simply be a copy of the original media (as in a Flat Installation), but frequently, software publishers which offer site licenses for institutional customers provide a version intended for installation over a network.

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