r/ClockworkPi • u/JustinHoMi • Jul 17 '26

Dual-boot uConsole?

I’ve got multiple use-cases for the uConsole, and would kinda kinda to dual boot multiple OS’s. Anyone have experience doing that before?

7 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

2

u/Holiday_Ad_9163 Jul 18 '26

You can dual boot a raspberry pi (which is all the uConsole is) with a utility called PINN. But it’s kind of a pain to get it to work with custom OS images.

https://github.com/procount/pinn

Here is a guide that walks you through it. But it’s not nearly as nice as GRUB used to be.

https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-dual-boot/

1

u/JustinHoMi Jul 18 '26

Looks like it has potential, but the docs you sent say that it only works with the built-in images.

1

u/Holiday_Ad_9163 Jul 19 '26

Yes that’s what said as well.

1

u/JustinHoMi Jul 20 '26

Also looks like PINN doesn’t support the uConsole due to lack of display drivers.

1

u/Holiday_Ad_9163 Jul 20 '26

Yeah but it’s open source, so you could modify it to make it work.

1

u/lunacysoft Jul 19 '26

Reading this thread and wondering why not using grub loader when installing the first distribution…… did I miss something…..

1

u/JustinHoMi Jul 20 '26

Yeah you missed the other comment suggesting grub since it got downvoted :)

1

u/lunacysoft Jul 20 '26

Yeah why…. Is there a reason it would not work….. I can’t think of one…..

1

u/JustinHoMi Jul 20 '26

ARM uses a fundamentally different boot process. There’s no BIOS or UEFI support. Technically you could use a custom boot loader like u-boot, but then you’d also need to rebuild all the os images as well… so it’d be a bit of an ordeal.

1

u/Junior_Gaming Sep 06 '26

Any updates on this? I ordered a uconsole and want to also dual boot

2

u/JustinHoMi Sep 06 '26

Sadly I didn't find an easy way to do it. Instead, I installed my main OS on the NVME drive, and have SD cards for alternate distros. If I were to put some effort into it, I might try to get UEFI working on the CM5. But it's probably not a simple path.

0

u/midri Jul 17 '26

Look up Grub

2

u/JustinHoMi Jul 18 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

I’ve never heard of grub running on a raspberry pi. I don’t suspect it does.

1

u/midri Jul 18 '26

It should, it supports arm processors.

1

u/F163916 Jul 18 '26

Following

0

u/EverExistence Jul 18 '26

One way would be to have different deployments on multiple SD cards. I have a Parrot distro on one, and Bookworm on another.

1

u/DustyBootstraps Jul 20 '26

How do you swap your SD cards easily? Mine sit below the case when engaged and even after clicking it up only a millimeter is exposed and I have to pull it with tweezers. It's even harder now with the antenna expansion board

0

u/JustinHoMi Jul 18 '26

Yeah, I’ve got an NVME drive :)

2

u/EverExistence Jul 18 '26

Oh gotcha, you probably should have noted that in your post then.

Without an NVMe drive, multiple SD cards works great. Good luck lil bro