When you download an image for your Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone or other SBC do you ever pause to think about how that image came to be? Installing the system for a single board computer rarely involves booting into an installer, indeed it rarely looks like an x86 system until well after the system is up. Why is this? To answer this I’m diving into what it took to add the latest hardware support to Void Linux: the Pogoplug Mobile (v4).

I have a lot of computers in my collection from machines I’ve wanted or otherwise picked up over the years. Some of these machines were aquired as projects and spend a lot of time in the off state. One of my oldest Void machines has been off for around 2 years now. With October fast approaching I decided I wanted to try and project a halloween scene into my window. I had the projector already along with some video clips that would work for this.

Into the Void. It sounds quite dramatic doesn’t it? These are the words you see when you start up the Void Linux installer and I thought it was quirky and different a few years ago when I installed Void for the first time. I still think its a little quirky now, but for different reasons. Enough people have asked me what I see in Void and why I think its special that I decided to write it down, and here is what I’ve come up with.

First day at Google! Its been a long ways getting here, but opportunity only knocks once. If nothing else, it will certainly be interesting.

Finally I’m done. I have my degree, I’ve finished my educational track, and in a few short weeks I’ll be moving to Mountain View, California to start my career as an SRE at Google. I couldn’t have gotten here without some incredible people, I’d like to list them below. Without your incredible help, I would never have finished, these people are listed in chronological order and with qualifications to the best of my memory.

My last spring break and I’m spending it doing a massive network refactor. I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. For a long time the CV gateways have been custom managed OpenBSD machines. With the rest of the network now under full Ansible control with very nice setups for managing them, its time the OpenBSD network layer was given the same treatment. About a year ago I started working on this thing called “SimpleGateway”.

Senior design is shaping up just as bad as everyone said it would be. Update February 2017: This program is wierd, how did we get our project approved? Update March 2017: I’ve heard of software scope creep, but never this bad. Update April 2017: Finally a build freeze and bugfix window. Update May 2017: Finally done; I would not wish this class or experience on my worst enemies. I have worked on large design projects in the past and this was not representative of any of them.

Twas the night before christmas and not a creature was stirring save an infrastructure engineer. The rest of my family has gone to sleep, the tree is nicely lit and tomorrow will come early. But we’re burning SLO and the contract will expire for Void’s current build machine on the 31st of December. I’m capturing all the state with Ansible to stand up the new build server on the 26th so that it will be ready to go in the next few days.

Its the start of December. I’m pretty much finished with finals and projects for this semester. Because of the stuff for the next semester this largely represents the end of my undergraduate career. Its been a long time gettings here and I wouldn’t be here without the help of many people. Looking back at this semester has had some incredible things: In September the LUG started up in earnest and I worked to get the office up and running as a functional space.

As I imagined getting Void into the T100TA would not be easy. It required custom install media and lots of fuss to get it to boot and then even more to install. Right now this just isn’t ready for prime time, the wifi doesn’t even work! Update January 2017: Wifi works out of the box now Update March 2017: Void supports hybrid boot, its possible to run x64 kernels now