“this may be a noob observation, but the command:”
Are you following what I said earlier ? You just repeated what I said.
Anyway…
Your error is because you are in a “computer” that doesn’t have a browser installed and may be doesn’t have a GUI interface. By default if jupyter notebook is called in a computer that has GUI and a browser installed , it tries to open it asap the service it turned on. But if you in a isolated environment without any sharing GUI interface its a useless try and you can disable it.
Try this:
jupyter notebook --no-browser
Or you can hack into the jupyter_notebook_config.py to set the key:
c.NotebookApp.open_browser = False