I'm hoping to give an install a try later this week, I'll report back.
We always have a few students running Macs, which screws us up since a lot of the software we use in the courses is Win based. Our uni has a virtual computing lab and they've really been helpful for this problem. We spend a little time creating an os image with the software fully installed, and students can remote in to a virtual machine. It completely eliminates our old problems of spending 90% of the demo time getting people up and running.
Ahah! Linux should actually be used.... it is free software. All the codes involved in this project runs nicely on linux (and therefore on mac os) :)