I've had no trouble running a binary in Fedora Core 2, compiled in Mandrake 10. I'm wondering if this same binary can work for many of the popular distros as well. How do commercial linux games support many distros without releasing sources? The binary in question is in this thread. It can only be run correctly from the terminal. When trying to run it by clicking on its icon, no resources are detected despite being in the same directory as the binary. Why is this so? Could it be that it's a console app?

The main thing to think about for compatibility with various distros is the use of shared libraries; your binary requires glibc 2.3.2 and libstdc++ 3.2, which will be a problem for Linux distributions having older versions of these libraries.

Distros are all the same, they have the same core libraries (glibc, etc), it's the little things that make distros attractive, like Yast for SuSE, or the closeness to Unix in Slackware, whatever. So if you compile something on one distro, it should be fine for most others.

Shouldnt be aby problem if you specify the shares libraries needed for your app.