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