elevate currently only works for OS X and Windows. The Windows support currently uses a Visual Basic script that ends up displaying a confusing prompt and is generally hoaky - it will be replaced by a C++ program that does the same thing but with a better prompt.
On OS X, it uses cocoasudo from here - https://github.com/getlantern/cocoasudo, forked from https://github.com/kalikaneko/cocoasudo to explicitly support OSX 10.6.
On Windows, it uses elevate from here - http://code.kliu.org/misc/elevate/. The
source code lives in elevate-1.3.0/src and can be built from a Visual Studio
command line by running nmake elevat.mak. The elevate makefile has been
modified from the original to 1. build as a windows GUI app instead of a console
app, 2. always build as 32 bit and 3. statically link the runtime. elevate.c
was modified to include a WinMain function.