Best Practices

I don't know not much about Kace with Linux, but, in the Red Hat flavored Linux world, use:

rpm -qa | sort | sed -n -e "s/\-[0-9].[0-9]*.*//p" | uniq

to get a clean sorted list.  There are no standard executable to search for.

First I would like to say that I'm not a Linux person at all. I have it installed on a few of my test VMs to make sure the client works basically, and then make it available for our Linux techs. Looking through the inventory on some of these it looks like the version for the system files end end ".el5" and ".el6". Would a report that filters out the display version ending in those two work?

SELECT M.NAME,IP, LAST_INVENTORY, S.DISPLAY_NAME

FROM MACHINE M

LEFT JOIN MACHINE_SOFTWARE_JT MSJT ON M.ID = MSJT.MACHINE_ID

LEFT JOIN SOFTWARE S ON MSJT.SOFTWARE_ID = S.ID

WHERE OS_NAME LIKE 'RED HAT ENTERPRISE%' AND

S.DISPLAY_VERSION NOT LIKE '%.EL5' AND

S.DISPLAY_VERSION NOT LIKE '%.EL6'

.... or filtering out the publisher of Red Hat?

SELECT M.NAME,IP, LAST_INVENTORY, S.DISPLAY_NAME

FROM MACHINE M

LEFT JOIN MACHINE_SOFTWARE_JT MSJT ON M.ID = MSJT.MACHINE_ID

LEFT JOIN SOFTWARE S ON MSJT.SOFTWARE_ID = S.ID

WHERE OS_NAME LIKE 'RED HAT ENTERPRISE%' AND

S.DISPLAY_VERSION NOT LIKE '%.EL5' AND

S.DISPLAY_VERSION NOT LIKE '%.EL6' AND

S.PUBLISHER NOT LIKE 'RED HAT%'