QuickTime Update Hangs

From Mac OS X Server FAQ

When QuickTime is updated, it displays a dialog box which needs to have a "continue" button clicked before it will continue. This occurs even when running softwareupdate from the terminal (shell); the output will stop at about 50%.

There's a few ways around this:

1) Don't update QuickTime. If this is a headless server, there's not usually a need to update QuickTime, unless it includes a security fix or you're doing QT streaming from that server.

2) Use Apple Remote Desktop to click that button. ARD is a tool much like VNC, but it is non-free and a separate purchase from Apple.

3) Attach any USB keyboard--monitor not required--and click the return button.

4) Find the dialog process number for QTInstaller in "top", and then "kill" that process. The installation process will continue normally.

5) The cleanest way is to configure the shell environment to properly handle this, but it appears that this setting is not recognized as of 10.3.5. However, here are instructions for doing so should it get fixed:

The exact method to use depends on which shell you are using. The default in 10.3 is bash.

To determine which shell you are using:

echo $SHELL

To disable the QuickTime registration splash screen with the bash shell:

export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1

To disable the QuickTime registration splash screen with the tcsh shell (the default in 10.2):

setenv COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL 1

6) You can purchase a license to QT Pro, and then it shouldn't ask you for subsequently for a license number.

7) Before running softwareupdate, you can dowload the package and decompress it, and then comment out the lines in the pre-flight install script:

e.g, in the Quicktime651.pkg, comment out the following lines:

--- From Apple's preflight script, sorry for the word wrap ---

1. Marketing (aka Amy Fazio) sez we don't need to bring up the registration dialog anymore
2. but let's just comment it out for now in case they change their minds. - duano! 3/16/04
3. ... see, QT BRB did change their minds on this. Putting it back until Gibson - duano! 3/17/04

if ("$ENV{COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL}" ne "1") { my $ALERT_APP = "$ARGV[0]" . "/Contents/Resources/QT6Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/QT6Installer"; my $EXIT_VALUE = 0;

my $cmd = "\"$ALERT_APP\" -showregistration"; if ("$uname" ne "") { $cmd = "sudo -u $uname \"$ALERT_APP\" -showregistration"; }

$EXIT_VALUE = system("$cmd");

if (($EXIT_VALUE >> 8) != 0) { if ("$installerPID" ne "") { kill "QUIT", $installerPID; } kill "QUIT", $runnerPID; exit($EXIT_VALUE >> 8); } }