

I'm far from knowledgable enough about Windows internals to understand how to be able to perform a fully-automated version of whatever setup.exe actually does (besides eventually run msiexec /i /qr on the MSI). Some examination of the Boot Camp setup.exe indicates to me that this executable performs several tasks and sets up some environment for the eventual execution of BootCamp.msi, which we're not always able to get with Brigadier's simple invocation of msiexec to install the MSI directly. Some people have confirmed issues with Boot Camp 6 and Windows 7 in general, so these may not be entirely Brigadier's fault. (See Caveats below) Important (!) note on support for Brigadierīrigadier has produced less-than-great results with some combinations of driver packages and hardware models in recent versions of Boot Camp 5, and now with Boot Camp 6. It was originally designed to be run as post-imaging step for Boot Camp deployments to Macs, but as it requires network connectivity, a network driver must be already available on the system. As of the spring of 2013, Apple has made a number of Boot Camp installer packages available on their support downloads page, but they are still a split across many different different sets of models and it is still inconvenient to ensure you have the correct package. The steps to do this manually are tedious, and there are many of them.

It's possible to use the Orca tool to edit the MSI's properties and disable the model check, but there are rarely cases where a single installer contains all drivers.

We'd like to maintain as few Windows system images as possible, but there are typically 3-5 BootCampESD packages available from Apple at any given time, targeting specific sets of models.This tool used to use dmg2img to perform the extraction of files from Apple's WindowsSupport.dmg file, but more recent versions of 7-Zip have included more completely support for DMGs, so dmg2img seems to be no longer needed. On Windows, the archives are unpacked using 7-Zip, and the 7-Zip MSI is downloaded and installed, and removed later if Brigadier installed it. It unpacks the multiple layers of archives within the flat package and if the script is run on Windows with the -install option, it also runs the 64-bit MSI installer. A Windows- and OS X-compatible Python script that fetches, from Apple's or your software update server, the Boot Camp ESD ("Electronic Software Distribution") for a specific model of Mac.
