Hello: I am not so surprised: this thread, has triggered lots of answers.
To me, this underline the need, for a given Linux application to be able to run on most "current" distributions. Or stated otherwise to be distribution independent.
If Altera (or any other vendors) do not want to do this, it is after all their choice to loose customers to vendors who will address waht seems to be a very common request. But I believe their concern is to have to test, and support their software on only one distribution, to make things possible.
Instead of having the (irrational in my view) position: "We support only this Linux" which inevitably will result in supporting the local Linux vendor (SUSE=Germany, REDHAT=US, MAndrake-France, etc...), I would suggest to rather support a "level" of Linux Kernel+Libraries.
A collateral advantage, would be for libraries and kernel developpers to evaluate if they did not break backward compatibility, by trying a few large applications.
In my view it is fine for vendor to test their distribution, only on one current version of Linux. (Current to me is latest and one before latest). I would advocate to use Debian, which is based on stability, rather than "bleeding edge", and is really open source. Unless I am mistaking it also uses unmodified Linux Kernels. (Commercial distributions tend to modify the kernel).
This will have the advantage to have Linux deliver what most of US want: freedom of choice, unlike proprietary operating systems.
To achieve this, could be either a fancy script, but I have to admit that I do not favor this: 1) portablility is not great, 2) Debugging can be hairy.
I am wondering if the best solution would not be, just a simple open source module written in C, which could do the necessary initialization (checking authorizations, setting of environment variables, openning of configuration files), and having this open source module, calling "Proprietary code" in object form.
This would allows user to develop and post on the net fancy installation files, specifics to a given distribution. Does this make sense?
Thanks for your attention.