I have seen this discussed on other forum posts but couldn't find a solution:
Trying to do a silent installation of Arduino 2.x in an enterprise environment still proves to be problematic.
I sit in our local municipality and need to update Arduino for the schools using the IDE, but even though I've been able to make a script using the .msi installer that silently installs no problem, when opening the IDE for the first time it prompts and requires administrator permissions to install the necessary drivers. This is obviously not ideal for this use-case, as the students don't have admin rights on their PC's. Arduino 1.x didn't have this problem.
Do you know a way to circumvent this, or is there documentation explaining a way to package the drivers so they come pre-installed once the script runs?
Hi @sufficientbigtoe. On the first run after a fresh installation, Arduino IDE will automatically install the "Arduino AVR Boards" platform and the drivers for those boards if the platform is not already installed. This allows the users with the popular AVR-based boards such as the UNO R3 to get started working on Arduino projects with as gentle a learning curve as possible; deferring the need to learn how to use Boards Manager until such time as they want to do a project with a more advanced board. The drivers are a component of that "Arduino AVR Boards" platform and installed as a step in its installation.
So the installation of the driver during the user's session could be avoided by the system administrator pre-installing "Arduino AVR Boards" during the Arduino IDE deployment. This can be done via a command line tool provided by Arduino that is named Arduino CLI:
(the machine identifier for the "Arduino AVR Boards" platform is arduino:avr)
This command will also cause the "built-in" helper tools Arduino IDE depends on for processing of sketches and working with the ports of Arduino boards to be installed.