I just figured out how to "burn" an image of a different distro using the matlab targetupdater.
I used the Adafruit Occidentalis V0.2 distro found here: http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-raspberry-pi-educational-linux-distro/occidentalis-v0-dot-2
The steps were somewhat involved but in short they are: (this assumes you've already installed the RaspberryPi as a target in Matlab as you'll need the 7-Zip utility)
- download the distro into a directory of your choice "YOUR/DIR" and expand if in a .zip
- re-compress using the 7-zip utility
- check the MD5 sum for both the .img (firmware) and the .img.7z (archive) and copy them to a temp file get tool from: http://www.winmd5.com/
- get the size (not the size on disk) of both the firmware and archive (in Win, right click, Properties) copy them to the temp file and remove any characters leaving only the numbers (remove the coma if in Win)
- run targetupdater (at the matlab command prompt)
- at the first option select RasPi, NEXT>
- Select Board Version, NEXT>
- when you get to the "Get Firmware" step select "From local folder"
- Browse to "YOUR/DIR" where the files are saved
- Hit "OPEN", this will result in an error but the updater will create the "raspberrypi_fwinfo.xml" file
- open this file (raspberrypi_fwinfo.xml) in the text editor of your choice
- Replace all the following fields:
- name= "your_firmware_name.img"
- archive="your_firmware_name.img.7z"
- archivesize="The archive size you saved in the temp file, step4)"
- archivemd5sum="The archive MD5 #s you saved in the temp file, step3)"
- firmwaresize="The firmsware size you saved in the temp file, step4)"
- firmwaremd5sum="The firmware MD5 #s you saved in the temp file, step3)"
- save the file
- "OK" the error you got in step 10
- Hit "OPEN" again
if all went well then it will advance to the next window and ask you to select the SD card and keep advancing until it starts to write the image to the SD
I Haven't tested the SD card but I'm hoping this will produce an RasPi OS that has all the goodies that Adafruit has packaged (sensor supports, etc) as well as the ones that Matlab updates the kernel with. I'll try to better document these steps with figures and possibly a video and some comments after I test it.