If you have an ubuntu/debian system , you can rebuild the deb file of any installed package. For this install the dpkg-repack package.

Autopackage is a distro neutral method of packaging up software for distribution to the Linux platform. It provides a sleek GUI for doing so and even installs itself from the first .package file you run on your system.

"...One of my favorite Emacs packages, which I frequently load at startup and leave running is the color-theme package..."

Some projects make it easy for Linux distros to package their software, others not so much. Google Chrome, or rather its Chromium project, is one of those projects that is emphatically not easy for Linux distros to re-package and ship. Tom Callaway of the Fedora project explained this week why he's packaging Chromium for Fedora users, but not as an official Fedora package.

The Advanced Packaging Tool, which has since been ported by Conectiva for use with rpm and has been adopted by some other distributions.

The installation instructions in most free software reviews aren't enough. If you decide a package sucks, how do you get rid of it? If a package rocks, how do you upgrade it? GNU Stow, a package manager for packages you compile and install yourself, provides an easy answer to both questions.

There are many, many Linux distributions floating around the internet tubes waiting to be downloaded for your computing pleasure. One thing they all have in common is some form of package management system.

Learn how to install, upgrade, and manage packages on your Linux® system. This article focuses on the Advanced Packaging Tool, or APT, which is the package management system used by Debian and distributions derived from Debian, such as Ubuntu.

Bless Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for his optimism. Writing for Computerworld, Vaughan-Nichols suggests that we don't need to wait for the Year of the Linux Desktop, because we've already had it. Somehow, I missed that. Vaughan-Nichols points to HP shipping Linux, Dell shipping Linux, etc., but come on: a trickle of retail activity does not a "Year of the Linux Desktop" make.