Best approach to writing a generic installer for a Linux application?

Question

We have a Linux server application that is comprised of a number of open-source tools as well as programs we\'ve written ourselves. Ideally we would like to be able to install t

Answer 1

You may want to try BitRock InstallBuilder. It is a cross platform installation tool that allows you to do exactly what you are looking for (adding users, installing services, install pre-compiled binaries, etc). Although some of the other posts mention a number of tools that you could use in your scripts, the problem is that every Linux distribution is a bit different and simple tasks like adding an user or installer a service are suddenly non-trivial when you need to do them across Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, RedHat, Gentoo, etc. A good cross platform installer should isolate you from all that. Many commercial open source companies like MySQL, SugarCRM, Zenoss, Jaspersoft, Groundwork etc. have built installers based on our technology exactly because of that (in addition to their regular source code tarballs, etc.) We also provide free licenses for open source projects.