Quote from Deleted user on February 25, 2020, 6:13 pm

I'm pretty new to both laser cutting and linux, however the second hand laptop I bought decided that windows 10 was going to run out(?!) and after some research I found linux would run the k40 whisperer and lightburn so figured the mini-gerbil should work. Thanks for that microsoft.

It does work, but if you're a noob with linux like me it won't work automatically on a clean install... thought I'd save someone the hours of head banging I had to do.

I basically followed the instructions below and it appears to have fixed it - my understanding is that Linux won't connect to a usb serial port without you allowing permissions via the terminal or something like that. The drivers mentioned on the official guide / trouble shooting guide aren't needed in the latest ubuntu - that bit works out of the box.

I'll be honest and say I have no idea which group was right - I added myself to all of them (probably a really bad idea). Probably a good idea to try one at a time and see if it works.

http://www.alexenglish.info/2014/03/arduino-3d-printer-usb-serial-device-permissions-linux/

Hopefully someone familiar with Linux can provide a more definitive way to get the mini-gerbil communicating via usb, but this appears to have worked for me and no-one else appears to have mentioned installing on linux that I can see. I haven't tried the inkscape plugins yet but lightburn auto-detects the card as GBRL and manually setting the device to gerbil works. For some reason it won't let me choose greyscale engravings (yet) but will allow me to change the power output etc so it's mostly there! Any insights would be really helpful