Starch installer

What is it?
The Starch installer is a work-in-progress project for providing a single, cross-platform installer for most or all distribution images including Sugar. The idea is to provide a single application and single set of instructions for installing a fully operational system including Sugar.

Goals

 * cross-platform installer (i.e. can be run on Mac OS X (Intel/PPC), Windows and as many Linux/BSD/whatever (any architecture) distros as possible)
 * cross-distro installation (i.e. can install Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, ... images)
 * installation to flash media (USB stick, SD card) and hard disk, supporting several disk layouts
 * "lightweight" (small download size, low RAM requirement)
 * modularized for easy extension
 * configurable to allow presetting source + target options (e.g. SoaS could preset the source to /dev/live)
 * works both outside Sugar and as an activity (Journal integration for downloads)
 * GUI and CLI modes
 * offline (use pre-downloaded image) and online (download image) operation
 * updating existing targets, preserving changes if possible

Non-goals

 * "native" distro installation, i.e. using RPM/deb/... packages as source (though distros are able to write a module to do this)

Features

 * can use local copy of image (already downloaded file, /dev/live) or download via internet, including updating an existing image (via rsync)
 * automatic detection of source image type (e.g. Fedora Live ISO, Debian Live ISO)
 * automatic detection of target devices (needs platform/distro specific modules)
 * supports verification (PGP, SHA-*) of images