It should be possible to run the Windows installer as non-admin

[refold]

Current installer almost works when run under a limited user account, but the error message could be more clear. A more ambitious goal is to support a special "limited user" install mode.

[refold]

Milestone 2009.4.0 deleted

[VZ]

Currently the installer refuses to even start up under Windows 7 without administrator credentials. This is annoying and makes the "Just unpack the files" installer option meaningless (as you need administrator rights to get to it in the first place).

It would be nice if either a simple .zip file could be provided (which, I think, would be enough especially if #129 is fixed) or the installer could only ask for administrator permissions when/if it really needs them.

[jeffz]

+1. This prevents me from installing the HP at university in the computer labs, which is a shame because I'd like to show other students how to program in Haskell with the HP.

[jeffz]

I've noticed the following is set in https://github.com/23Skidoo/haskell-platform-windows/blob/master/Nsisfile.nsi

;Request application privileges for Windows Vista RequestExecutionLevel? admin

Can we have a build without this?

[refold]

I produced a new installer with RequestExecutionLevel? set to 'highest' instead of 'admin' (the download link will be posted here shortly). The 'just unpack' option should now work for non-admin users on Vista/7, though the standard install will fail with a non-intuitive error message.

It looks like the right way to do this is to start as a user and try to obtain admin privileges dynamically. On failure, only "just unpack" and "install for the current user" options would be available.

This may be relevant: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/UAC_plug-in http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Docs/MultiUser/Readme.html

Unfortunately, I do not have time to pursue this further right now.

[MtnViewMark]

Milestone 2010.4.0.0 deleted

[nponeccop]

Any progress on this? The HP 2012.2.0 installer just says "Error opening files for writing" when an installation is attempted on Vista from a non-administrative account with UAC prompts on, so I have to manually run the exe as an administrator.

Expected behaviour: display an UAC elevation prompt so I can enter admin login/pass. Actual behaviour: A failure with unclear error message and no prompt.

[refold]

@nponeccop Thanks for the reminder, I'll try to fix this for the next release.

[refold]

This turned out to be harder than I expected. The recommended way is to just set RequestExecutionLevel to admin, but we can't do that since we also want to allow non-admin users to run the installer in portable mode. The UAC plugin is supposed to help with that, but I can't get the examples to compile ("Invalid command: UAC::_").

I tried doing the following:

!macro CheckAdmin thing
UserInfo::GetAccountType
pop $0
${If} $0 != "admin" ;Require admin rights on NT4+
    MessageBox MB_YESNO "It is recommended to run this \
    ${thing} as administrator. Do you want to try to elevate privileges?" \
    IDNO CheckAdminDone
    SetErrorLevel 740 ;ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED
    Quit
CheckAdminDone:
${EndIf}
!macroend

but the return code seems to have no effect. MultiUser.nsh seems to be old XP-era code that doesn't know about UAC prompts.

If anyone has ideas on how to proceed, I'm eager to listen. For now, I've just added a warning if the installer is run as non-admin.