The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Chocolatey’ Category

Installing Poppler on Windows via Chocolatey, which includes pdfimages for lossless extraction of images from PDF files

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/09

At the time of writing there was an almost 3 year old [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | Poppler 0.89.0 version so I filed the issue [Wayback/Archive] poppler 23.03 has been out for a few weeks, can you please update the build? · Issue #88 · chtof/chocolatey-packages mentioning [Wayback/Archive] Pull requests · oschwartz10612/poppler-windows

Poppler 23.03.0

Since that did not get really solved, I finally found out that after installing scoop, then scoop install poppler did work and installed version 23.08.0 (which I documented in [Wayback/Archive] Poppler version out of date · Issue #75 · chtof/chocolatey-packages installs from the most recent [Wayback/Archive] Releases · oschwartz10612/poppler-windows).

A very different approach is to install Poppler inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as explained in [Wayback/Archive] Poppler On Windows. Python, PDFs, and Window’s Subsytem for… | by Matthew Earl Miller | Towards Data Science.

I needed Poppler (or actually the Windows equivalent of poppler-utils) of two reasons:

  1. I wanted to experiment with pdftotext as it has these very compelling command-line switches.
  2. I needed to export images for which pdfimages is the poppler tool to go.

pdftotext

Let’s start with qoutes from [Wayback/Archive] pdftotext: Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03) | poppler-utils Commands | Man Pages | ManKier:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, man/manual pages, mankier, PDF, Power User, Windows | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Chocolatey Software | GNU sed

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/24

I needed to document how to install sed on Windows (which I did a long time ago after writing Plastic SCM: show the current changeset abstract (without files) on the commandline) and recently for some more scripting work(which I will blog on that later this week).

At the time of writing it was [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | GNU sed 4.8, but this Chocolatey command will install or upgrade to the most recent available version:

choco upgrade --yes sed

Of course, like yesterday’s post Installing OpenSSL on Windows, you could use winget or scoop for this as well. Finding out the commands is left as an exercise to the reader (;

Query: [Wayback/Archive] chocolatey sed – Google Search

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Scripting, sed, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on getting CrystalDiskMark portable on Chocolatey

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/03

I needed the portable version of [Wayback/ArchiveCrystalDiskMark on Chocolatey (unlike the [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | CrystalDiskMark (Install) package). Luckily I found the auto-update package [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | CrystalDiskInfo (Portable) and knew both that CrystalDiskMark is from the same author as CrystalDiskInfo, and that their code is on GitHub like the Chocolatey package.

Given I had a the below chocolatey-packages/automatic/crystaldiskinfo.portable as a template, I asked the CrystalDiskInfo (Portable) package maintainer if they were willing to maintain CrystalDiskMark (portable) as well and was glad the response was “yes”: [Wayback/Archive] Portabe CrystalDiskMark similar to the current CrystalDiskInfo? · Issue #159 · mkevenaar/chocolatey-packages

So for my link-archive:

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Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Hopefully by now the Chocolatey .nuspec extensions and limitations are documented in a more central way

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/08

Chocolatey extends the NuGet file format .nuspec based XML files as base for their packages with at the time of writing very sparse and limited documentation in what it extends, why it does that and what extra limitations it imposes on the fields used inside .nuspec files.

Hopefully by now that has improved, so this post is a reminder to myself to check that out eventually.

At the time of writing, the NuGet .nuspec documentation was at [Wayback/Archive] .nuspec File Reference for NuGet | Microsoft Learn and the file format at [Wayback/Archive] NuGet.Client/nuspec.xsd at dev · NuGet/NuGet.Client. Most fields are defined as primitive data types xs:boolean, xs:string and xs:anyURI (of the 19 available primitive XML SChema (W3C) types). Some composite data types are are composed from them using local and global complexType, most using xs:all, xs:attribute or single-type unbounded xs:sequence (which all imply no particular order).

Since an XML Schema allows to both use restriction and extension on data types (the eXtensible in XML!), making them more strict is a relatively straight-forward operation and has the benefit of having these in a central place.

In the past for more than 5 years [Wayback/Archive] Is there a specification for the package format? · Issue #379 · chocolatey/choco was just pointing to the NuGet .nuspec format, but after a request to re-open new comments were made pointing to a current issue (basically a stub, but still) and a Chocolatey nuspec.xsd file, yay!

Still it was a quest to figure out the additional rules they have added, especially since the documentation was sparse and sloppy.

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Posted in Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, XML/XSD, XSD | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on testing locally modified chocolatey packages

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/01

A few notes after I helped updating [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | SetACL (Portable) 3.0.6.0 to version 3.1.2.0 and [Wayback/Archive] Updates glab from 1.22.0 to 1.24.1; fixes #2 by jpluimers · Pull Request #3 · corbob/ChocoPackages.

As the burden on maintainers (not just Chocolatey ones) is high, not all packages get updated soon after new underlying software versions arrive.

Which means the maintainers are often very happy when an occasional user helps and preferably sends in a pull request.

That brings me to the an important point IN DOCUMENTATION DO NOT LIMIT EXAMPELS TO ONLY ABBREVIATED PARAMETERS OR VERBS as that scares away occasional and novice users of your software.

Chocolatey documentation is no exception on this, hence this blog post meant for people other than maintaining chocolatey packages on a day to day base.

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Posted in CertUtil, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Installing Chocolatey on Windows 10 and up

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/02

Steps for installing Chocolatey on Windows 11 and up or 10 version 1803 and up.

Since I often install Windows on machines where it is not easy to copy/paste longer install commands my steps are slightly different than the ones on [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | Installing Chocolatey:

  1. Start a regular command prompt
  2. Either these two (the options are equivalent, see [Wayback/Archive] curl: transfer a URL | curl Commands | Man Pages | ManKier for --remote-name and -O):
    • curl --remote-name https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1
    • curl -O https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1

    Note the cURL pre-installed on Windows 10 since at least 6 years*: release 1803 or insider build 17063 is good enough to download the Chocolatey install script

  3. Inspect the downloaded install.ps1 to check if you spot anything you dislike
  4. Start an elevated (administrator) command prompt
  5. Start PowerShell
  6. Execute this command
    • Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
  7. Execute this command in the folder where you downloaded install.ps1
    • .\install.ps1
  • Yup, a custom build of cURL has been pre-installed on Windows 10 and up since more than 6 years:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, cURL, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Note for future self if .NET hash calculations from `ComputeHash()` are slower than expected

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/26

Normally when calculating hashes in .NET you use the [Wayback/Archive] HashAlgorithm.ComputeHash Method (System.Security.Cryptography) | Microsoft Learn.

This can be slow as [Wayback/Archive] cmcginty showed while answering the question [Wayback/Archive] How to get an MD5 checksum in PowerShell – Stack Overflow by [Wayback/Archive] Luke101 posing a faster solution (in this case for md5, but it can be generalised):

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Posted in .NET, C#, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Deploy .NET Framework 3.5 by using Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) instead of Chocolatey and some notes on PowerShell colours

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/07

Since every now and then, like testing software developed with older tools, you need to run older software.

This always works: [Wayback /Archive] Deploy .NET Framework 3.5 by using Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) | Microsoft Learn

DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFx3 /All

Use /All to enable all parent features of the specified feature.

(The /All is needed because software requiring .NET Framework 3.5 also require the parent features).

Notes:

  • Tested on Windows 10 and Windows 11 in 2022.
  • It can take a really long time (more than just a few minutes!) even on fast connections.
  • Installing through Chocolatey with `choco install dotnet3.5 fails on Windows 11 (have not tried on Windows 10) with the classical red on black PowerShell default error theme*:

    ERROR: The term 'wmic' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
    The install of DotNet3.5 was NOT successful.
    Error while running 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\DotNet3.5\Tools\ChocolateyInstall.ps1'.

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Posted in .NET, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, C#, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, PowerShell, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Hopefully by now the choco client will be more resilient and informative about Chocolatey maintenance windows (and maybe even about any disruptions mentioned at status.chocolatey.org)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/19

Reminder to check-out of the 2015 issue mentioned in the tweets below has been had any progress.

At the time of tweeting, choco has no notion of [Wayback/Archive] status.chocolatey.org which would be very helpful to point to in case of errors on time-outs on chocolatey server calls especially if it could interrogate and inform of maintenance windows and outages when things fail on the client side.

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Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

What to do when suddenly some or many .nupkg became zero length and Chocolatey thinks none of them are installed?

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/04

A few years back I suddenly had almost all my .nupkg files that Chocolatey uses to track installed software become zero sized.

So I posted a question at [Wayback/Archive] Need help restoring .nupkg files having zero size · Discussion #2765 · chocolatey/choco which got this answer:

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Posted in Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »