Building your own uConsole OS from a stock Raspberry Pi OS image
Snoozer94's guide and chroot recipe for turning any Debian-based image into a uConsole CM4 image with the ClockworkPi kernel and packages.
What it takes
- Software only
Difficulty 1 of 3 — easy.
Details
Enrico (Snoozer94) boiled ClockworkPi's official instructions down to a text guide: chroot into a Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm image on another machine, add the ClockworkPi APT repository, remove the DevTerm-only packages and install the uConsole kernel and utilities, then fix rotation and the 4G modem, chroot out and flash. The repository carries the guide and prebuilt Bookworm desktop and Lite images from March 2024.
The maintainer now describes the project as an archive and points to the forum for current images, but the recipe is still how the Kali wiki page and other ports are made.
Links
Open at Forum thread- GitHubRepository
- Forum: the Bookworm chroot recipeForum
Related mods
The community's recommended OS: Debian 13 on Rex's patched Pi kernel, desktop and Lite variants, for CM3+, CM4, CM4S and CM5.
The previous Debian release of Rex's line, still rebuilt for the new screens in 2026 — the fallback when something on Trixie is not ready yet.
crossplatformdev's GitHub Actions pipeline builds flashable Bookworm, Trixie and Jammy images with a choice of eight desktops, on Rex's kernel.
ClockworkPi's own images: CM4 v3.1 on Linux 6.12.62 (April 2026), the older XFCE build, and the A-06 and R-01 releases, with MD5s on GitHub.
Rex's Kali image for CM4 and CM5 on the uConsole kernel with the hardware presets; cuu's original CM4 build is documented on the ClockworkPi wiki.
Rex's Parrot OS build for CM3/CM4/CM5 in Home and Security editions, plus krokowitz's Security spin with RTL-SDR and ALFA drivers preinstalled.