Hello all-
It has become painfully clear to me that while I am able to convert my fellow social scientists and friends to linux, a disconnect exists.

i once made a remastered version of my ubuntu with all sorts of social psych goodies (Referencer, pybibliographer, bibus, pspp, R, Rkward, etc) all in a distro and distributed it to a few who were interested.

However, I use more than 1 distro.
I also love arch/gentoo, etc.

What I'd love to learn is how to write a script that can be executed on any (or at least a debian, arch,and gentoo based) distro and install programs.

All of the programs I'd like to install come from the ubuntu science lists in the sections of statistics, bibliography, and word processing.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuScience

Well here's my question:
how do .bin binary install files that you see with proprietary software get around this?
To my knowledge, in the past when I've used a .bin, its not been distro specific, and its been a breeze to get it to work.

Nevertheless, I feel that I could (and would) do a lot of people in my area (and my new linux converts NOT in the social sciences) if I could provide something like this.

Any guidance would be appreciated.
Obviously, it should first and foremost work on ubuntu, since that's what most people use anyways.

Also, as it is pertinent to our conversation, I feel I should point out this project:

http://nixstaller.berlios.de/news.php

Perhaps my social science/statistics experiment should be their guinea pig, as well.