softwareinventory with different preinstalled Linuxmachines

[Patrick Cervicek]

We have a grown linux environment, which are different in
hardware/distribution/installed software.

We are more interessted in FAIs "softupdate" function than "install". We
would like to gather the information about the softwarereleases installed
on our clients. This could be done with
   aptitude search -F '%p%v' ~i
or
   rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME},%{VERSION}\n"

Can Fai
... gather information about installed software/versions?
... be installed on clients, which have not been installed with FAI?

Often the packagenames differ from debian, suse, gentoo.
Are there maybe better tools for our case?

Patrick
BTW: Where can I send improvements for the fai-guide.pdf?