Well, as the semester starts coming into full swing, I'm putting my personal projects on hold.  While part of it is because I'm already studying a lot of tedious materials and learning even more will be hard, the biggest reason is my senior project.  I also have a few monetary concerns, as I need to buy a decently-large SSD to run my VMs off of.

This doesn't mean the end of my posts for the rest of the semester.  Instead, I will be documenting my senior project and my progress on it in addition to code updates on GitHub.  My original project idea was to create an automation system for setting up a Raspberry Pi cluster, but the goal has now shifted.  Instead, I will be attempting to adapt Rocks Cluster Distribution to ARM so that it works on Raspberry Pis.  Currently the distribution only supports x86, x86_64, and IA-64, but Raspberry Pi clusters are a common enough beginner project that having it available will hopefully be well-received.  My only real concern is that the most recent version is from December 2017, so it's been over a year since it last was updated.  However, while re-packaging the distro I may end up helping update it so we will see if that makes a difference.

Right now it seems that the first step is to figure out what does and does not work on ARM.  The CentOS base already runs on Raspberry Pi, but some of the required tools and libraries may need to be rewritten or re-packaged.  The next step will be learning to cross-compile so that I can avoid compiling packages on a Raspberry Pi - I have a decent workstation so why not use it?  Last, I will be learning to package a distro properly.  There are a few recent Linux Journal articles that I can use for reference on this, and by this step I hope to be either done or close enough for it to make no difference.

These steps may change throughout the semester, I'll be meeting up with a faculty advisor for guidance.  With such a well-defined project ahead of me, I hope to post weekly updates to document the process.