We like to keep the OS installation clean/stock. That is, install RHEL and any packages required for the engineering applications and try to keep the installation packages to the minimum that are required. Typically the EDA vendors will have a script that checks that all of the Linux package required the application. If we find any dependencies we install on all machines. The LabView Linux installation script wants to be run as root and install packages. Would rather see a dependency check script so that we can install the dependencies ourselves and know what is being installed.
For the application tool itself we don't want to install in /usr/local on all machines but rather install into a NFS mounted file server so that we only need to install once and not install on each machine individually. The current Linux installation script doesn't take an argument to specify an installation directory other than /usr/local.
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