Exactly, and I'm not saying E-Live is the best or anything...I just thought it had really reasonable system requirements compared to the specs of the IT's, so I was using it as an example.

Actually, it might be easiest to just create a script to download all of the necessary files and then install them. That way, a new (enormous) install file wouldn't have to be created every time a package in the list got updated...it would automatically download the newest version of each package and then install them.