So after much head banging against the computer I think the latest problem is that the Fanstel USB Dongles use a secure DFU bootloader instead of just a regular DFU bootloader, which means everything needs to be signed to be installed.
What I thought was successful on the windows machine eventually was exactly the same on Ubuntu. nrf-Connect for desktop can find the USB Dongle and can find the .hex file to load, but will not allow activation of the write ability to move the hex file to the Dongle. I think the problem is the secure part. I have to somehow sign both the bootloader and the application.
I did have a few small successes:
I got the docker OpenThread Border Router web gui working. I originally thought it did not work but was not including the :8080 in the URL. What worked was:
http://127.0.0.1:8080
This shows the FORM tab which makes your thread network. Since my Dongle does not work, this part can’t setup the network, hopefully this part will be easy when my other Dongles arrive.
I think once the Thread Network is created, I then use the Thread Commissioning App to add other devices.
…
I found out today that when installing Ubuntu applications for the desktop, the ones you don’t use a command line but just click on. You have to use:
chmod a+x filename.ext
before clicking on it. (This is standard behavior for running command line apps,I just never thought about needing to use it to run desktop apps)
…
I also found out that
ctrl-v
to paste HTML text is very different from
shift-ctrl-v
which pastes plain text (not sure why it took so many years to find that out) 