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.