Attempting to run the installer as a normal user gives this error message: “There has been an error.
This installer requires root privileges. Please become superuser before executing the installer” If you are using a centralized installation on an NFS server with root squash, root will be the one user guaranteed not to be able to write to the install location. If the NFS server is a different platform from the software being installed, it may be impossible to run the installer as root from the NFS server.
It is not correct for the installer to require root, and in many cases just makes things unnecessarily complicated. If you want to keep the current installer system, perhaps not having root could be downgraded to being a warning. Alternately, you could ship a normal tgz of files including an installer app to put them in the right places. Some users could bypass the installer and just install the loose files by hand.