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ADB : Android debug bridge

To assist in debugging and to gain shell access to the phone with Android, you can use

 adb

Installing ADB

For example if you stored the Android SDK in your home directory, you will find adb and the other binaries in the subdirectory tools. Add this directory to your PATH environment variable. E.g. on MacOSX

 export PATH=/Users/myuser/androidsdk/tools:$PATH

or on a Linux Machine:

 export PATH=/home/myuser/androidsdk/tools:$PATH

Replace myuser by the name of your home directory.

Enabling Debug mode

Due to security issues with ADB, the shell has been disabled by default in AoF. You can enable ADB again by navigating to Settings -> Application -> Development -> USB Debugging. See AndroidDebugBridge for updated information

Connecting

You should be able to connect to the phone as long as you start it up with the USB connected to your host. I don't think it will work if you plug it in after starting. Of course, you need to setup USB_Networking (ifconfig usb0 ...) on your host before connecting.

Sometimes, adb gets stuck: if you cannot to the device run "adb kill-server" before trying other commands.

If Adb cannot find any device: Make sure you can ping the device. Make sure the date and timesettings are valid. Kill the background running adb-server by "adb kill-server" and start your first adb instance (which starts the background process) with "ADBHOST=192.168.0.202 ./adb devices". After that, you can run adb without ADBHOST-Variable.

Some helpful commands are:

 ./adb logcat - like a tail -f of the android log
 ./adb logcat -b radio - same as above for the radio logs
 ./adb shell - bring up a command shell to the phone
 ./adb kill-server - kill the background server on the host
 ./adb install app.apk - install app.apk on the phone

Fixing startup problems

Startup problems (Beta2): adb shell to the device and delete /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db

See also

• Main Android page on this wiki
• Debug Board