In many of these cases you may wish/need to store the installation files on a server and distribute them out to your clients with a script. Here are the scripts I use. Some of this requires knowing about setting up shares over the network. In many cases I have put application installation files on a share in the same way as my distributed etc settings.
Adobe reader has to be downloaded and installed on machines if you wish to use it. As I'm not a fan of Adobe I'm happy to use up their bandwidth, however if you feel nice you may wish to host the installation file on your server. Or if you want to save your bandwidth!
Download the acrobat reader installation files from the internet (under Linux the below command will get a copy but they may have added a more up to date copy of acrobat reader by the time you read so it may be worth while checking):
wget http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0.8/enu/AdobeReader_enu-7.0.8-1.i386.tar.gz
and unzip them with commands like these:
gunzip -d AdbeRdr70_Linux_enu.tar.gz
tar -xf AdbeRdr70_Linux_enu.tar
cd AdobeReader
Now you have the installation files somewhere you can install the application with the command:
./INSTALL
If you prefer to install with a script then things get more complex. there is a command line argument that allows you to do this essentialy it stops the installer asking where to install to:
./INSTALL --install_path=/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0
similar to the reader. Download the flash player installer for Linux. Unzip and extract:
gunzip -d install_flash_player_7_Linux.tar.gz
tar -xf install_flash_player_7_Linux.tar
then run:
flashplayer-installer
this require interaction I think :-s
Alternatively if you use Debian or Ubuntu you can:
apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
however I don't know if you can script this as it asks you to confirm that you have to download stuff from macromedia :-s