Licensing GSP Deployments by Terminal Command


Update 21 September, 2018: This doesn’t work at all for 10.13.6. If you’re trying to activate on 10.13.6, find more details here: Activating Geometer’s Sketchpad in macOS 10.13.6 (and beyond?)

Update 26 July, 2017: Recently I found this not working any more. I had to send the command through Apple Remote Desktop (or run it locally on the machine). Even with the sleep commands (or without them), scripting seems to have died as an option for GSP. Maybe it will be resurrected later? The good news, I guess, is that now you can use double-quotes, too?

I had an old workaround for prepping GSP for Munki that didn’t activate things in the sanctioned way.

The problem is the silent-install documentation as written is misleading. For example, this is the example given for a silent install for Mac OS X:

GSP5.app/Contents/MacOS/GSP5_Rel_KCPT_31_105 -license register -name “NAME” -code CODE
Notice how they put the name of the school/organization in double quotes? Well, that doesn’t work.

I had the command failing for me to register and to de-register. So I did some Googling and found some JAMFers running into the same problem: register/deregister Geometer’s Sketchpad.

Turns out you need single quotes instead of double quotes. And you have to take out the dashes in the registration code.

There is an additional issue a user brings up of scripting the command not working but the command working fine if pasted directly into the terminal.

I’ve found a workaround for that (for Munki, and not Casper, but I’m assuming the issue is similar, and so the fix the same)—just putting some pauses in the scripts. I haven’t experimented with what the exact thresholds are, but these seem to work.

For postinstall_script:

#!//bin/bash
sleep 3
/Applications/GSP5.app/Contents/MacOS/GSP5_Rel_KCPT_31_105 -license register -name ‘Name of Your School’ –code ************************
sleep 2

For preuninstall_script:

#!/bin/bash
/Applications/GSP5.app/Contents/MacOS/GSP5_Rel_KCPT_31_105 -license deregister -name ‘Name of Your School’ –code ************************
sleep 3

When I took out the hyphens, switched double quotes to single quotes, and put in some pauses in the scripts, the scripts executed just fine.


5 responses to “Licensing GSP Deployments by Terminal Command”

    • Thanks for putting it on my radar again. Initially, I’d just decided the command didn’t work and used my workaround. I’m glad I was able to revisit this and also help someone else out.

  1. Just so you know, later in 2019, a new Mac version of Sketchpad will be available that is 64-bit compatible.

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