I’ve been running LightBurn from a laptop for a couple years and it’s been great. I moved my laser to the garage and continued operating it using a VirtualHere UBS Sharing running on a RaspberryPi. I also happen to have a Jetson NX Xavier that I decided the other day would be great to just leave next to the laser and run LightBurn at the laser rather than sometimes remotely.
I’ve got the Jetson NX setup with Jetpack (NVidia’s painted up Ubuntu), so the NX is running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I can install LightBurn 1.2.01 using the .run or the .7z file, and LightBurn shows up in my app menu. However, when I try to run Lightburn, it throws the icon into the tray but doesn’t actually run any software or open any windows. I’ve tried to open a LB file using “Open With”, but I can’t find the program and it won’t let me search the file system manually. I also don’t get any sort of errors or problem windows popping up, LB just doesn’t seem to run at all.
Am I missing something? Do I need to add some other packages that maybe NVidia didn’t have in place? Or maybe I just need to sudo the bash command when I install it? I’m kind of at a loss here because everything seems to work correctly, until I try and execute the program.
LightBurn is not supported on anything other than these specific Ubuntu releases. Any other distro is very much your-miles-may-vary.
LightBurn is tested on Ubuntu Linux, and current releases are officially supported on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04.
Ubuntu 18.04 users unable to upgrade to a more recent version should download LightBurn 1.2.01, the last release compatible with their operating system.
Ubuntu 20.04 users can use any of the installation methods described below.
Ubuntu 22.04 users will need to use LightBurn’s new AppImage installer.
You may be able to use similar techniques to what I did to get LightBurn working on Raspberry Pi to get this to work. It’s not for the faint of heart, however, unless you’re already familiar with some of the concepts involved.
If you upgrade to an Ubuntu 20.04 based Jetson release you may be able to use the Pi solution as-is but I haven’t tested for it. In fact, you may be able to eliminate many of the included libraries since you’d be running against the expected Ubuntu libraries.
If you want a small Linux computer at your garage machine then maybe look at the x86 based AtomicPi. I’ve run Lightburn on the default Ubuntu installation a few years ago. But then again, a 10 year old laptop might only cost $50 and has both screen, keyboard and mouse built in and a recent version of Linux with LightBurn would likely run great on it.