I mentioned autopackage previously. I’ve used it to install the last two minor versions of Gaim and it has worked great. Still don’t entirely know how it works, but from what I could tell from the installation it went out to a central server to grab some stuff, then asked me to install a dependency that it couldn’t get by itself. If more packages could be made available, this would be a great distribution-neutral Painless Installation Tool. Ah, the long search for good clean PITs…