what is oracle shiphome? I am trying to install oracle grid, One of the Oracle installation steps says, 


  set the variable ORA_SHIPS to the path location where you are going to
  extract the 11.2.0.4 shiphomes


Please explain what is shiphomes ?
shiphome is nothing but a specified location in Oracle grid  installation environment , Which identify that your runInstaller meets all Oracle installation  requirements. If your installing the grid file , which meet the prerequisite installation required privilege like ( Oracle Home, Central inventory,Meta-data files ,operating system certification &amp; location of file ) then installation  will success. If during installation Verifying environment and performing prerequisite checks if any such specified path not meet then shiphome Error comes.

If you are getting the shiphome error during installation. 

Please be sure about that  some points like 

1) oracle grid installation has stop before oracle grid patch installtion
2) Before installation of Oracle grid service, sure about the specified node-list path is correct or not.


for your ref https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/relnotes.112/e23557/toc.htm  and http://www.snapdba.com/2014/01/oracle-database-11gr2-11-2-0-4-installation-on-oracle-linux-6-4/