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