I\'ve written an application which as of yet is not open source and I\'d like to distribute the executable across various linux distros. What\'s the best way to do this, I\'ve l
MojoSetup is a user-friendly, perfectly cross-distro solution and nicely-licensed (zlib, very permissive). All it requires is the standard sh shell which comes with any Linux distribution. It also allows for desktop shortcuts the easy way by creating freedesktop.org spec shortcuts, which are supported by just about all graphical environments for Linux (so just dump in a PNG at different resolutions and fill in the blanks of the .desktop file).
Installers are scripted using the very simple Lua programming language and there are several example installer scripts in the Mercurial repository as well as a lengthy tutorial. There are also many years to back up its development into a lightweight cross-distro installer.