Work in progress

This page contains links to things that I have found helpful in my attempt to survive with Android.

Shell access with adb

adb is the Android Debug Bridge, which enables communication between an Android device and a Real Computer. I haven't got round to looking at all its capabilities, but it does allow access to the Android device via USB, and it provides a relatively normal shell environment.

FreeBSD setup

The good news: it works well and presents a relatively sane interface to the Android system, including files that are inaccessible to most apps. The not-so-good news: setup is non-trivial. I'm still learning, and some of what follows may be incorrect or suboptimal, but it works. I welcome constructive feedback.

• Install adb, which is in the android-tools package.

• Become a “developer” on the phone, which involves going to Settings/About Phone in the setup menu and then tapping 7 times on the “Build number” information. A corresponding message will appear.

• Go to Settings/System/Developer Options in the setup menu and enable USB debugging. This is essential to enable access, but the phone protests:

  
  

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• Turn the phone on and connect it to the computer with a USB cable.

• As root run:

  # adb devices
  * daemon not running; starting now at tcp:5037
  * daemon started successfully
  List of devices attached
  4lzlrwtwei55cacu        device
  

  A message will appear on the phone:

  
  

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Then continue:

# adb shell

And then you're in! Simple, isn't it? Points to note:

• It can be that adb devices returns with the response

  # adb devices
  * daemon not running; starting now at tcp:5037
  * daemon started successfully
  List of devices attached
  4lzlrwtwei55cacu        unauthorized
  

  This should go away when you accept “Allow USB debugging?” on the phone.

• If the list of devices is empty, something has gone wrong. One possibility is that you have tried to run it as a different user then root.
• At least on my phones, the “root file system” shown by other apps appears here as /sdcard.
• For reasons I don't understand, my phone doesn't have less, only a version of more that doesn't allow searching. I work around this by saving the output to somewhere where I can download it from outside.
• The phone continues to function normally, as far as I can tell. In particular I can access it with ftp to download files that I have saved.
• To exit, don't just pull the USB cable. Exit the shell first. Otherwise adb will hang when you try the next connection.
• You should be able to stop the adb daemon with adb kill-server, but this doesn't always work. killall adb does seem to work.

Random links