In addition to a very nice link provided by Daniel, I would only mention that today it is not that critical to have software for your specific platform and OS. You can use virtualization instead. In my case, the decision was to install ZEMAX for Windows in a guest system on a RHEL6 server.
I have ever heard some softwares based on ray-tracing method, e.g., ASAP, tracepro, lighttools and ZMAX (as mentioned by Andrej). But I do not know whether these softwares could compatible with scientific linuxn.