Hello! I was asked on reddit to write a small post here about my small project, maybe someone would find it useful.
Recently got a uConsole with a CM5 board. While looking into available OS options, it turned out that neither ClockworkPi’s nor stock Pi OS supports the device out of the box — so I decided to make a small project based on the stock image + DKMS for the drivers that aren’t included. And here it is.
The idea is to keep the kernel stock and updatable, with hardware support living in out-of-tree DKMS modules + device-tree overlays instead of a custom kernel. Nothing here is tied to Raspberry Pi OS specifically — it builds against the stock Raspberry Pi kernel, so the same approach should work on other Pi distros (Ubuntu, Debian, etc.). I’ve tested it on Raspberry Pi OS (Trixie); on other distros the installer would need small tweaks, since it currently assumes apt and RPi OS package/paths.
How to use it:
Flash the latest Raspberry Pi OS with the Imager tool (set hostname, user/password and Wi-Fi in the Imager settings)
SSH into the device
Copy the project over (scp -r) and run ./install.sh
After a reboot you get a fully working device: display, backlight, keyboard/trackball, audio (with headphone auto-mute), volume control, battery reporting, and the power button.
Also it was tested that updating rex kernel to stock one + installing the drivers works too, so you don’t have to reflash your device.
No, currently unfortunately not. The overlay files of CM5 are incompatible with CM4, and I don’t have CM4 board to write and test them. Maybe someone can do it, pull requests are velcomed
No problem Well I might assume you can try to use usb ethernet then Or you might connect HDMI cable and usb keyboard for example, I assume it shall work without problems. Or as I know using /boot/firmware/user-data you might try to execute script right on boot placing it on SD card.
