Thank you @clabos for these great instructions. I spent all day tinkering trying to get this working and then found your instructions and sorted it within 20 minutes!!
The only things I did different in case they help anyone were;
Used VMware Workstation Player instead of vSphere to quickly set up my linux desktop within Windows. When setting up the Ubuntu environment, I had to change a setting in my bios setting to turn on acceleration or something.
I think when trying to run the pip command, pip wasn’t installed by default so I had to install this, but the Ubuntu terminal told me exactly what to do so was straightforward
To find /.local/bin it’s in /home/username/
I think that was all I had any issues as the instructions were amazing.
After spending a day installing this, I just installed owntracks, life360 and gpslogger from HA integrations in about 15 minutes. I have no need for all 4, but I found Google maps quite slow to update my location into HA when out and about earlier, so I plan to keep an eye on which is most accurate/quicker to update/battery friendly in future. Though Google has a big advantage of not needing an additional app.