I set up an old ACER C740 chromebook as my flight laptop and here’s the steps I used.I used MrChromebox to install ubuntu. I added a 128GB USB drive and set that up as /usr so I’d have more free space.

libgconf-2-4 was missing so I added deb http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lunar main universe to /etc/apt/sources.list and sudo apt install libgconf-2-4

download and install

• sudo apt install emacs git python3-setuptools fuse make fonts-inconsolata screen
• sudo apt install ruby-dev ruby-bundler gcc libssl-dev g++ (for bundle install / jekyll stuff)
• sudo apt purge gdm3; sudo apt autoremove; sudo apt install gdm3
• echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/audio_disable_powersave.conf (fix crackling sound)
• Google Chrome (turn off Windows Scrolling Personality)
• ELRS Configurator
• EdgeTX Companion
• iNav Configurator
• Betaflight

ELRS Configurator

For ELRS Configurator I needed to sudo dpkg -i --path-exclude=*/opt/*/icons/* expresslrs-configurator_*.deb until this bug is fixed.

EdgeTX Companion

EdgeTX Companion has an .AppImage in that zip file. I copied it to /usr/local/bin/ and chmod a+x it then I made this file in /usr/local/share/applications/EdgeTX Companion.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=EdgeTX Companion
Icon=/usr/local/share/icons/EdgeTX_StarLogo_Color_Vector.svg
Exec=/usr/local/bin/EdgeTX_Companion_2.10.5-x86_64.AppImage

I got the icon from here (via here).

Emacs

To make it so that Emacs only shows as one icon in the dash on the side I followed these instructions and added =emacs to all the --alternate-editor flags in /usr/share/applications/emacsclient.desktop and then pinned that application to the dash.

Everything broke, machine hung

At some point during this, everthing broke and I couldn’t unlock the machine and then it wouldn’t boot into the graphical UI and hung while the last message displayed was about gdm. I managed to fix it by booting into recovery mode and uninstalling and reinstalling gdm. I think these are the steps I used:

1. power up and keep pressing the escape key to get into the bootloader menu
2. select the default boot option
3. keep pressing escape again and you’ll get a grub> prompt
4. type normal and then press enter and press escape one more time
5. you should now be in a simple grpahical grub menu where you can select recovery mode
6. after recovery mode has started select to drop down into a root shell
7. type apt purge gdm3
8. type apt autoremove
9. type apt install gdm3
10. control-D to exit back and start up as normal.