Can anybody give me a hint please as to what I’m doing wrong here? After a lot of trying around I got to the point where esptool is pulling the chip id (only with correct port added) but I can’t get it to install the firmware for the life of me, with or without port info added in the command.
Looks like you don’t have esptool.
sudo apt install esptool
Take a look at the error message 
The device install script requires the esptool python package, and not the esptool package from your OS repo!
Just follow the provided instructions:
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follow the instructions!
you need to:
pip3 install --upgrade esptool
to install the esptool python package that the script needs.
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Yeah it think it’s confused because I seem to have both pip 2.7 and 3.6 on my computer. 2.6, 3.6, pip3….man this is all rather confusing. When I check version number it says 3.6 but when trying to use above command it says it’s up to date and 2.7 is no longer supported.
I’m sure this is a very silly problem but I only recently switched to Linux with this machine and I’m still way out of my comfort zone with both Linux and Python. I might just do it again from scratch on my windoze laptop to at least remove one variant out of the equation. I think I might have done something wrong during the initial installation of pip. I realize this isn’t a Linux forum nor Python so I’ll try to solve it by myself. Thanks for trying to help, I do appreciate it.
You need to follow the instructions closely. Why do you stop at installing pip?
pip is a python package manager that you need to install the missing PYTHON esptool package.
The command sudo apt-get install esptool is installing esptool from your operating system repository, but this is not the right version for the script. The script needs the PYTHON PACKAGE VERSION OF ESPTOOL.
All you need to do is follow the instructions which say to execute the following command:
pip3 install --upgrade esptool
Please execute it and post the output here. Otherwise we can’t help you 