Unfortunately, I don’t get to choose the Linux distro on a Chromebook. And using a 2nd package manager (e.g., gentoo’s Portage) sounds dangerous. I have no problem building from source; but not everyone is comfortable doing that. Also, many Chromebooks are pretty weak (I was lucky to find a fast machine with lots of memory at a really good price)
In the end, I was able to install swi-prolog-nox on a Chromebook using these files that I copied from a Ubuntu system:
/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/swi-prolog_ubuntu_devel.gpg
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/swi-prolog-ubuntu-devel-focal.list
where:
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/swi-prolog-ubuntu-devel-focal.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/swi-prolog/devel/ubuntu focal main
# deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/swi-prolog/devel/ubuntu focal main
So, it might make sense to add “manual” installation instructions similar to those here: Installing Bazel on Ubuntu - Bazel main
This would require having the public key available in its “ASCII-armored” form (I’m guessing that this would be done with gpg --armor --export).
My attempt to install swi-prolog-x failed with
Depends: libjpeg8 (>= 8c) but it is not installable … the other dependencies (libx11-6, libxft2) are no problem. Debian seems to come with libjpeg.so.62.3.0, but I don’t know how to trick apt into accepting it (assuming the older version of the library suffices).