Show HN: Scoop – A command-line installer for locked down PCs with Powershell 2

5 points

11 years ago

I'm a lead contributor to the Windows command-line installer, Scoop. Previously, Scoop only worked with Powershell 3+, but due to the silly number of PCs running basically stock versions of Windows 7 (or earlier) with Powershell 2 available, I saw the opportunity to bring Scoop to these machines.

On a personal note, I'm a student at the University of Newcastle, Australia that has many PCs as described above. You don't have admin access (for obvious reasons) and you can't install anything. Downloading and using portable apps is possible but painful when the list of things to install gets big.

So, over the last weekend I've back-ported Scoop to Powershell 2 (with the help of a few libraries) and I was hoping to get some patient HN users to test it out if they have access to PCs as described.

The install process is basically the same as on the Scoop site (http://scoop.sh/) but you need to run a different install script which I'll provide below:

    set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s currentuser #enable powershell
    iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lukesampson/scoop/powershell2/bin/install.ps1')

I'm pretty sure most things work (I have been testing on a fresh Windows 7 VM). The biggest problem so far is that jq (JSON parser) is slow (or my programming is crap). So installing something with a big .json file (like busybox) takes about 25 seconds to load into a Powershell object.

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