Q4OS Imager

Q4OS Imager is a graphical utility for writing operating system images to USB flash drives and SD cards. It is the recommended way to create bootable Q4OS installation media, and it can also write arbitrary local disk images.

It is a friendly fork of Raspberry Pi Imager by Raspberry Pi Ltd, rebranded and configured for the Q4OS operating system. See PROVENANCE.md for the exact upstream baseline and a summary of the changes made in this fork.

• Website: https://q4os.org
• Contact: devteam@q4os.org

Features

• Downloads the current Q4OS image list and writes the selected image in one step
• Writes local images (.img, or compressed .zip, .gz, .xz, ...)
• Verifies the written medium after flashing
• Runs on Linux and Windows

Installation

Q4OS / Debian

sudo apt update && sudo apt install q4os-imager

Windows

Download imager-<version>.exe from the releases page and run it. The Windows installer is built from the source code in this repository by the public GitHub Actions workflow .github/workflows/windows.yml; see PROVENANCE.md and the code signing policy below.

Building from source

Debian/Ubuntu

Install the build dependencies:

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends build-essential devscripts debhelper cmake git libarchive-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev \
    qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools qtdeclarative5-dev libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev libgnutls28-dev \
    qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-controls2 qml-module-qtquick-layouts qml-module-qtquick-templates2 qml-module-qtquick-window2 qml-module-qtgraphicaleffects

Build the Debian package and install it:

git clone https://github.com/q4os/q4os-imager
cd q4os-imager
debuild -uc -us
sudo apt install ../q4os-imager*.deb

An icon is created in the start menu under "Utilities" or "Accessories". The application runs as a regular user and calls udisks2 over DBus for privileged operations like opening the disk device for writing. If udisks2 is not functional on your distribution, it can alternatively be started as root with sudo.

Fedora/RHEL/CentOS

sudo yum install git gcc gcc-c++ make cmake libarchive-devel libcurl-devel openssl-devel qt5-qtbase-devel qt5-qtquickcontrols2-devel qt5-qtsvg-devel qt5-linguist
git clone https://github.com/q4os/q4os-imager
cd q4os-imager
mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ../src
make
sudo make install

Windows

The canonical Windows build is the GitHub Actions workflow .github/workflows/windows.yml, which anybody can run on a fork of this repository (workflow_dispatch); it produces the NSIS installer as a build artifact.

For a local build, install Qt 5.15 with the MinGW 32-bit toolchain and CMake (from the Qt online installer) and NSIS, build src/CMakeLists.txt in Release mode (for example from Qt Creator), then compile the generated q4os-imager.nsi script to create the installer. OpenSSL 1.1 runtime DLLs are required if your Qt build does not use schannel; the workflow file shows a checksum-pinned way to obtain them.

Privacy

Q4OS Imager does not collect or transmit any usage statistics by default. The download-statistics telemetry present in the upstream project is disabled at compile time in this fork (ENABLE_TELEMETRY=OFF in src/CMakeLists.txt) and can only become active if a user explicitly enables it in the options dialog.

Network access is used solely for the application's core function: fetching the OS image list and downloading the image selected by the user. This program will not transfer any other information to any networked system unless approved by the user.

Code signing policy

Windows binaries are built from the source code in this repository by the public GitHub Actions workflow .github/workflows/windows.yml.

As the project gets some more reputation, we will ask for Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.

Team roles:

• Committers and reviewers: Q4OS Team (devteam@q4os.org)
• Release approvers: Q4OS project lead

Security

See SECURITY.md for supported versions and how to report vulnerabilities privately.

Other notes

Debugging

On Linux the application prints debug messages to the console when started from a console. On Windows, start the application with the --debug command-line option to open a console window.

Custom repository

If the application is started with --repo <URL>, it uses a custom image repository, so a second start-menu shortcut with that parameter lets you use the application with your own images.

License

Q4OS Imager is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE. license.txt additionally summarizes the licenses of the bundled third-party components (Qt, libarchive, libcurl, drivelist, mountutils and others).

Copyright (C) 2020 Raspberry Pi Ltd (upstream). Copyright (C) 2026 Jupiter4 foundation.