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.