Novacom with Windows 7

Overview

The novacom installers included in the WebOS Doctor do not support being installed in Windows 7. However, if the files are unpacked and installed manually, the drivers and the novacomd service work just fine. Below is detailed a procedure for manually installing the drivers under Windows 7. We have been able to create Windows 7 installers for novacom, but unfortunately since they contain Palm's intellectual property, they cannot be posted up for general use. Work is in progress to create a workaround.

Manual installation under Windows 7

To install Novacom under Windows 7, you need to unpack the installer and manually copy the files over, run the driver installer, and then add the Novacomd service to the registry. The following steps will walk you through this procedure.

1. Download the webOS image.

1. Change the file extension from .jar to .zip and then extract the archive.

1. Browse to the folder webosdoctorp100ewwsprint/resources/. Click in the address bar and copy the full path of this folder to the clipboard.

1. Click on //Run...// in the Start Menu, and in the box enter: msiexec.exe /a "{copied_path}\NovacomInstaller_x86.msi" /qb TARGETDIR="{copied_path}\NovacomInstaller_x86" (for 32-bit Windows) or msiexec.exe /a "{copied_path}\NovacomInstaller_x64.msi" /qb TARGETDIR="{copied_path}\NovacomInstaller_x64" (for 64-bit Windows). Instead of typing {copied_path}, each time you see it, paste in the path you copied to the clipboard instead.

1. Now you should see a new folder called NovacomInstaller_x86 (or NovacomInstaller_x64) inside the resources folder. Open this folder, and then inside that, open the PFiles folder. Copy the Palm, Inc folder to C:\Program Files\.

1. You should now have a C:\Program Files\Palm, Inc folder. Browse to this folder, then inside that, open the novacom folder. Run the dpinst.exe program that you find there.

1. Right-click and //Save As// either novacomd_x86.reg (for 32-bit Windows) or novacomd_x64.reg (for 64-bit Windows). Double-click the .reg file you downloaded to add it to the registry.

1. Restart your computer. This step is not optional.

Automatic installer (work in progress)

As noted, automatic installers cannot currently be distributed because they contain licensed code from Palm. Work is currently being done to create a wrapper for the existing installers. You can follow the progress here. Another idea involves creating a binary patch for the existing .msi files using Orca or some similar tool.

Credits:

Credit goes to bsiegel for the procedure and code.