That’s great! So now that we’ve established Tropy works, let’s try to make it more convenient for you to use. First you need to decide where it should be located on your disk. Typically, every Linux distro has one or two places where third-party apps are installed, but I’m not sure if there’s such a convention on Chrome OS. In any case, this is essentially up to you – it’s just important that you know where it is, because if you download a new version of Tropy in the future you’ll want to completely replace that folder. To find out the full path to your current folder you can type pwd in the terminal, if you’re currently in that folder where the ./tropy command worked.
Once you know that path, you can configure the .desktop file that will hopefully let you add Tropy other Chrome OS apps on your system. In your Tropy folder, please find and open the tropy.desktop file in a text editor. Next, edit the two lines that say
Exec=tropy %u
Icon=tropy
Using the full path. For example, if you’ve installed Tropy to /home/fl00rb0ard/tropy you would change the lines to:
Exec=/home/fl00rb0ard/tropy/tropy %u
Icon=/home/fl00rb0ard/tropy/resources/icons/hicolor/512x512/apps/tropy.png
If you made these changes and saved the file, try the following back in the terminal:
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications
cp tropy.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
The first command creates your the app launcher directory, in case it does not exist yet, and the second copies the desktop file to this directory. After this is done, try to see if Tropy has now been added to other apps on your Chromebook (not sure how this works, but I’m assuming there’s some kind of dock or window where you can see all the installed apps); if it isn’t restart the system, to see if the changes get picked up after the restart.
If that didn’t help, try to copy the desktop file to /usr/share/applications/ instead (sudo cp tropy.desktop /usr/share/applications/).