But then....

Subject: But then....
Name: Chris
Date: 1/17/2002 11:07:39 AM (GMT-7)
IP Address: 206.248.112.40
In Reply to: mmmm... posted by ludicrous
Message:

If you had, say, a Samba file server on Linux, and you installed a program, say, MS Office, on one machine, but set it to install on a network drive on the Linux machine, you'd have the software installed on the server, but be running it from the workstation. Now, if you were to install the same program on all your computers, but install the files to the same place, all on the Linux server, you'd have 1 copy of the program on the server (over-written 5 times, mind you...) but all the correct registry entries, etc. would all be on the local machines.

Would that work? Only problem you'd have is if you tried to uninstall it from all the machines. The first one would delete all the files from the server, then the uninstall on the other 4 boxes would probably crash, because it couldn't find anything to delete. You'd maybe want to make a backup of the install directory, uninstall, then copy it back into the same place again for the next uninstall.

The only potential problem I see for this is that some programs store configuration info in their program directory, as well as the registry. I know MS Visual Studio 6 recommends against installing into the same place for both OS's in a dual boot situation, so I assume it would work the same way with something like this....you'd want to check your docs for that.