In short, ADB shell allows you to run a shell on your phone, issuing commands from your computer and having the phone execute them. It’s the same basic idea as the shell environment in linux/osx terminal. It’s a command line environment, running on your phone, that you communicate with via the USB connection to your computer.
Setting up
In order to take advantage of the ability to run a shell on your phone to the fullest, you need to be rooted, and for the purpose of this article, I’m going to assume you are.
You also really need to have busybox installed. While android has some basic command line utilities (generally located in /system/bin), busybox has basically every command line utility under the sun. This market app installs busybox. Just install and run it and grant it superuser permissions, then hit “install”. If for any reason it gives you a choice, you want it installed to /system/bin.
For some reason, on my dell streak, it hangs up on installation, never telling me it’s done, even though it does successfully install busybox. If it hangs up on you too, failing to do anything after 2 or 3 minutes, just reboot. We’ll know soon enough if it worked.
Start a shell session
To start a shell session, connect your phone to your computer, making sure you have USB debugging enabled on your phone (Settings > Applications > Development). Open terminal and type
adb devices
It should return a device ID, indicating that your phone is connected, and ADB detects it. Now enter
adb shell
You should be rewarded with a dollar sign. Let’s make sure you’re rooted. Pick up your phone, unlock the screen, and keep it in your hand, then type:
su
The first time you do this, you’ll be prompted, on your phone, to grant adb shell superuser permissions. Obviously make sure “always allow” is ticked and select “ok” to grant permissions. It should return a pound sign in place of a dollar sign now. (My rom actually gives you SU permissions by default, a lot of them do not, so you will most likely have a dollar sign when you first enter shell, then a pound sign after granting SU)
Now enter:
busybox
and you should be greeted with something like this:
If you have a pound sign, and you get that response when you enter “busybox”, you’re good to go. That’s means you’re rooted and have busybox installed.
Basic Shell Usage
First, some basic commands.
cd
Change Directory. Just like in any other *nix environment, it’s one of the basics of terminal navigation. When you start a shell session, you’ll be in root, ( / ). From there, let’s say you want to move to the SD card.
cd /sdcard
Now you should be in the /sdcard/ folder. To verify, use
pwd
pwd = Print Working Directory. In other words, output your current location within the file system.
Now let’s see what’s on the sd card using
ls
ls = list. This command will list all files in the current directory.
Let’s say I want to start an adb shell session, get root permissions, go to a folder on the sdcard named “tempfolder”, make sure I’m in the right folder, and then list all files in that folder.
For directories with lots of files, use
ls | more
(The vertical line is above enter, lol)
This will list all files and folders, showing only what fits in the terminal window until you press a key to show more. The space bar will get it to load the next page of results.
For example, just using
ls
with no options in the system/bin folder results in this:
I’m not going to screenshot the whole thing, but based on the scroll bar on the side, you get the idea as to how many files it just spit out. Using the more option cuts the results up into much more manageable chunks:
Starting to make sense?
Busybox usage
Busybox is a bunch of unix terminal utilities that allow you do pretty much anything you want. There’s no way I could even remotely begin to cover all of the utilities included in busybox, much less all of the options for them, so I’ll just hit a few of the very common ones. The wikipedia article has a full list, and you can click a command and learn more about it.
cp
cp = copy. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Let’s say you have a file name myfile.txt in /sdcard/tempfolder, and you want to copy it to /sdcard/tempfolder2
will move the original file from /tempfolder to /tempfolder2. The file will no longer be in the original location.
rm
rm – remove
Let’s say we want to get rid of myfile.txt
busybox rm /sdcard/tempfolder2/myfile.txt
mount
Not a lot of people will use this command other than to make a file/folder writable.
busybox mount
will list all mount points, but by far the most common usage of the mount command will be
busybox mount -o remount rw /system
That uses busybox to run the mount command with the option (-o) to remount the directory /system with the ability to both read and write (rw). In other words, if you can’t write to some file in the /system directory, or can’t modify some file located in that directory for a hack, that will remount the /system directory so that it’s writable. It should revert to read only (ro) after you reboot, or you can remount it yourself:
busybox mount -o remount ro /system
mkdir
make directory. This makes a new folder. For example, if you want to make a directory on your sdcard named “vids”
busybox mkdir /sdcard/vids
rmdir
Remove directory. Basically the same thing as the “rm” command, just for directories instead of just files. Let’s say we decide we don’t want that “vids” folder we just made…
busybox rmdir /sdcard/vids
Note that rmdir won’t remove a folder unless it’s empty. To do that we use rm and the recursive option. If you already put a video in the /sdcard/vids folder, and you want to just get rid of the folder and the video in it:
busybox rm -r /sdcard/vids
I’m starting to get cross-eyed from staring at my terminal window, so I’m going to stop for now, I’ll continue with fastboot usage and likely some more adb shell stuff within the next day or two. Hope this helps a little.
As much as I piss and moan about people needing to install the Android SDK if they intend to mod their phone, I feel obligated to do a tutorial.
While the title specifically states “For Mac”, that really only applies to the installation. Once you have the SDK installed, the commands are more or less the same in ADB.
Installation (Mac Specific)
1. Download the SDK. It will come in the form of a zip. Extract it somewhere easy, like the root of your username. You’ll get a folder called “Android-sdk-mac_86″ or something similar.
2. In finder, navigate to the sdk, then find the tools folder. Open it, and double click “Android”. It will launch a terminal window, then a few seconds later, a GUI. On the left, click on “Available Packages”, then in the right pane, check the box to select all, and hit “install selected”.
It will download quite a bit of data, so depending on your connection speed, it may take a while. While you’re waiting on that, use my tutorial to set up a bash profile.
3. On your Android phone, go to Settings > Applications > Development, and make sure “USB Debugging” is checked. Connect your phone to your computer with the USB cable.
4. Assuming the SDK is fully installed and downloaded, close the terminal window it opened and the gui. Open a new terminal window. If you’re not sure how, press Command + Space and type “Terminal” then enter. You’ll get a black box with text. Type “adb devices” and press enter. If everything worked, it will return a device ID to indicate your phone is connected and detected by ADB.
Navigating Basics
In order to effectively use ADB, you need a basic grasp of navigating your computer from terminal. Opening a terminal session will start you at the root of your user name, in finder, this will be your user name in the left hand pane, right under “desktop”. Entering
~/
or
cd
will get you back here.
If you intend to flash an img, push a file, etc, the easiest way to do so is to navigate to the directory in which the file is located. For example, if you want to push (I’ll explain what “push” means in a few, just stay with me) a file that is located on your desktop, and is named yourfile.zip to the SD card on your phone, you can either use
adb push ~/username/desktop/yourfile.zip /sdcard
from anywhere in terminal, since you’re using the full path to the file, or you can first navigate to the file’s location:
cd desktop
and then
adb push yourfile.zip /sdcard
which doesn’t require the full path, but rather works from the current directory.
Either way, you need a basic idea either how to determine the full path of a file, or how to navigate to the file’s location. Let’s cover the basics.
cd – Change Directory. This is what you’ll use more than anything. The format is
cd (location)
For example, let’s say you have a folder on your desktop named “android”, and inside that folder you have a folder named “apps”. To get there from ~/, you would enter
cd desktop/android/apps
Now let’s verify our location in terminal.
pwd
Now use ls to list the files in that folder
ls
That pretty much covers the basics. A few shortcuts:
cd will take you back to the root of your name from anywhere
cd .. will take you up one directory
ls -a will show all files
ADB Commands
adb push
adb push will “push” a file from your computer to your phone. The format is
adb push (location on computer) (destination on phone)
For example, let’s say you navigate to your desktop, and you want to move the file “song.mp3″ to the folder “music” on your phone’s SD card.
adb push song.mp3 /sdcard/music/
adb pull
adb pull is exactly the opposite. To pull song.mp3 from the music folder on your sdcard to your desktop:
adb pull /sdcard/song.mp3 ~/desktop/
adb install
adb install will you install an app via adb, using an apk file on your computer. If you have app.apk downloaded to your desktop, and have navigated to desktop in terminal
adb install app.apk
You need to have “Unknown sources” checked on your phone, found at settings > applications for this to work.
adb logcat
adb logcat is insanely valuable in trying to diagnose issues. Simply enter
adb logcat
and you’ll start to get a real time log of everything going on with your phone. It might not mean much to you, but it can be a valuable tool when asking for help.
That’s all I feel like writing for now, I’ll cover ADB shell, fastboot, and perhaps more extensive stuff later. Hope this helps.
The Android SDK is very easy to get up and running on OSX, it doesn’t require any drivers or anything, just run the android app and it does it’s thing.
Unfortunately, OSX doesn’t have a .bash_profile by default. Without creating a .bash_profile and adding your sdk/tools folder to path, you’ll need to navigate to the tools folder of your sdk and run scripts locally when using stuff like ADB and fastboot.
I know that just gave you a headache, so I’ll clarify with examples.
Let’s say you download the sdk, and unzip it to yourusername/android-sdk-mac_86
In order to run adb, you’ll need to open terminal, and type
cd android-sdk-mac_86/tools
then you’ll need to start every command with the dot slash ( ./ ), which tells the terminal to run commands from the folder you are currently in.
For example,
adb shell
attempts to run the script adb, with the command shell, to open a shell, and it looks for the scripts where ever it thinks scripts will be. On a Mac, it only looks in /bin by default. This is where the scripts for the commands you use to navigate in terminal are stored. It contains stuff like ls, mkdir, cd, etc.
If you want it to run a script from your current location in terminal, you have to add the dot slash. For example, still in your sdk/tools folder, the command
./adb shell
Will attempt to run the script “adb” with the command “shell” from your current location, in this case, sdk/tools.
We’re going to add sdk/tools to the places OSX looks for scripts, so you don’t need to be in that folder in order to use adb or any other SDK script. For instance, you can navigate to the desktop and use ADB to install an APK on your desktop without moving it to the tools folder. Clear as mud? Great.
Press Command (apple) + space and a spotlight search window will pop up in the upper right corner. Start typing “Terminal” until you see it highlighted, and press enter. A terminal window will open.
Type:
cd
Press enter. You should be in your root directory.
Now type:
touch .bash_profile
then press enter. You just created a file called “.bash_profile”. Now open it with text editor using this command:
open -e .bash_profile
Pressing enter will make text edit pop up, it’s likely blank, since you just created it. In the text file, paste this:
Obviously replace yourname and the path to your sdk/tools folder with the correct info for your install.
Save the file and close text edit.
If you did it right, you’re done. With your android phone plugged in, type
adb devices
and if you get a device returned, you’re good to go.
12/07/10 Update:
It appears that updating your SDK to include all the new gingerbread stuff moves ADB from sdk/tools to /sdk/platform-tools. Basically, all you need to do is add one more line to .bash_profile. Under the line you added earlier, something like:
I was having some issues getting my devices recognized in fastboot/adb on Ubuntu.
“fastboot devices” just returned back to the terminal prompt, without showing any connected devices, so I tried using the -i option to specify a usb vendor ID, like “fastboot-linux -i 0x413c reboot”. This just hung on “waiting for device”. I kinda ignored it, since I actually use my mac for most fastboot/adb, but tonight I was bored and fucking off on the CyanogenMod forums shoutbox, and someone was having the same problem. I did a bit of googling and found a solution that worked for me (and M.P.)
As usual, I’m not responsible for fucking your phone up or accidentally dividing by zero or going back to the future or hacking the gibson or anything else that happens. I’m not an expert. I wouldn’t listen to me, I’m kinda an asshole, I have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m usually just guessing. Proceed at your own peril, etc, etc, etc.
Here’s the step by step fix, assuming you’re running ubuntu 10.04:
1. Open a terminal window.
2. Log in as root.
sudo -i
3. Create a UDEV rule file.
cat > /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
This should give you a blinking cursor at the very beginning of a blank line, it’s waiting for you to tell it what the file needs to contain.
4. Enter this AFTER YOU REPLACE “XXXX” WITH YOUR VENDORID:
5. Press CTRL + D to save, it should return you to the terminal prompt
6. chmod the new file
chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
7. Try fastboot. It should work now.
fastboot devices
Hopefully you get “Attached devices” with your devices serial number, if so, you’re good to go, fastboot should no longer hang at “waiting for device”. To be sure, try
After a few hours of pulling my hair out digging around in the system files in an attempt to find a way to determine if someone’s HTC Desire has an AMOLED screen or a Super LCD screen, I realized there was a much easier way to tell the difference.
An AMOLED screen doesn’t actually display the color black at all, it simply turns off any pixel that is supposed to be pure black.
An LCD screen, on the other hand, does actively render the color black.
As such, an AMOLED screen displaying a black pixel looks exactly the same as an AMOLED screen that’s “turned off”, while an LCD screen looks decidedly different.
So, if you open photoshop/paint/whatever, and make an image that’s totally black, (hex code #000000), or just use this one I’ve so helpfully provided, it will look a lot different on an AMOLED screen than it does on an LCD.
This is black.
This is that very same image displayed on a Nexus One, with an AMOLED screen (left) and a Dell Streak, with an LCD screen (right), in the dark.
And both off, in darkness.
Note the AMOLED Nexus One looks the same, where it’s obvious when the Streak’s screen is on.
Now in normal light. Both powered on. Nexus One on the left, Streak on the right.
And again powered off.
Again, you can clearly tell when the Streak’s LCD screen is powered on, but the Nexus One’s AMOLED screen looks the same. This should be a pretty easy indicator as to which screen you have.
I wrote this for a forum post, and figured I would share it here too. Hope it helps. Check the XDA Developers forum and http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ for a lot more info. None of these files/roms were written by me, and all credit goes to the people who did the hard work. As usual, I assume no responsibility. Unlocking your bootloader will technically void your warranty. I’m just telling you what worked for me, I’m not a professional. I wouldn’t even listen to me, I’m usually drunk. There’s a solid chance I’m just making all of this up. Also, I did this all on a Mac running OSX Snow Leopard. If Linux/Windows/Whatever is vastly different, you’re boned, and it’s not my fault. Essentially: Don’t come crying to me.
This will get you a .zip file. I would extract it to the root of a drive or just one folder down (like to C:/ or ~/ in mac or C:/sdk) You’ll understand why later. After it’s extracted, go find the “tools” folder. Double click the “Android” file. It will pop up a command/terminal window, then a GUI. In the GUI, click on “Available Packages”, select all of them and install. This will take a bit. When it’s done, you can just close the window and the command prompt.
Now you need to add fastboot. You can compile it yourself, but that would be silly. Here’s a windows 32 bit version I found on XDA:
Then you need a new rom. Download it to your computer, then move it to the SD card on your phone, don’t unzip it or anything. I highly suggest this one from CyanogenMod. His roms are fast and stable, by far the best I’ve found.
I believe in windows you need to download some drivers, but I’m not sure, as OS X didn’t require any drivers. Windows users should google “Android USB drivers” right about now, and come back when they’ve made sure they have the right ones.
Connect your phone via usb and put it in bootloader mode by turning it off, then holding the trackball down while you power it back on. It should boot a white screen and say “Fastboot USB” near the top.
On your computer, open Command Prompt or Terminal, depending on your OS, and navigate to the folder the SDK is in and find the “tools” folder. If you listened to me and saved it somewhere easy, like the root of a drive, this is simple. Say you saved it in C:/sdk. You would click the start button, then “run”, then “cmd”. This gives you a command prompt. To get to the proper folder, you would type “cd\” to go to the root of C:, just so we’re all on the same page, then “cd sdk/*android_sdk_orwhatevertheynamedit*/tools”. In my case, on a mac, it’s “cd /android/android-sdk-mac_86/tools” If that still doesn’t make it clear, you might be better off just leaving your phone on the stock rom. Effectively, navigate to the tools folder of the sdk in terminal/command.
Now type “fastboot devices” and hit the enter key (Or “./fastboot-mac devices” for a mac) and see if it recognizes that your phone is connected If so, you’re ready to go.
*When you unlock the bootloader in the next step, it will wipe the phone and erase all of your data. Any pics on the SD card are safe, and you can redownload the apps you’ve paid for, but if you have a text or something you find important, make sure it’s backed up*
First unlock the bootloader. Type “fastboot oem unlock” then hit enter (Mac: “./fastboot-mac oem unlock”). It should walk you through the unlock process and warn you that your warranty will be void. Just follow the instructions. Once you’re done, boot back into bootloader mode by holding trackball and powering up. You should have an open lock under the multicolored Nexus X now.
It will take you back through setup, but you can just power down, since you’ll have to setup again when you flash the new rom.
Now you’re gonna flash the recovery image. Again, hold the trackball while you boot the phone to put it in bootloader mode, and again, in command prompt, navigate to the /tools folder and type “fastboot flash recovery recovery-RA-nexus-v1.7.0.img” (Mac: “./fastboot-mac flash recovery recovery-RA-nexus-v1.7.0.img”)
It should flash the recovery image. Now reboot into bootloader again. (Hold the trackball while you power your phone on) This time use the volume and top (screen lock) button to navigate. Press the top button to select “bootloader”.
It will load another screen. Press the volume down button to select “recovery”. At first it will do nothing, this is normal, it’s checking the device. You’ll see a few things flash on the screen in green, again, normal.
It will go back to the menu, and now you can use volume down to select “recovery”.
Highlight it and press the top button to select it. You’ll see the multicolored X as it boots into recovery. At this point, your trackball will be used to select things.
Go to “Wipe” and do a “Factory Reset” wipe first, then go back to the main menu.
Select “Flash zip from sd card”, pick the file I had you download above (the rom file), confirm that you want to flash.
Once it finishes you’re done. Boot up and set up your phone.
So you’ve got a netbook that came with Windows XP, and you want to put Windows 7 on it, but it doesn’t have an optical drive. You could buy Asus’ External DVD Drive, which is pretty slick, but if you only need to install Windows, there’s a way to do it without dropping the money on an optical drive. Pick up any 4GB or larger USB thumb drive, if by some chance you don’t already have one. I used an 8GB A-Data Drive I had lying around. Get your copy of Windows 7. If you downloaded it, you’ll need to find where the ISO was saved on your computer. If you’re using a disc, put it in the disc drive on your other Windows based computer, but don’t run it, obviously.
Stick the USB drive into your windows based computer, and disconnect any other external drives, just to be on the safe side. You need to make your thumbdrive bootable and format it. Luckily you can do this with a program built into Windows.
Click start, and select “Run”. A box will pop up asking you what you want to run. Type “cmd”. This will open a command prompt.
Type “diskpart” (without quotation marks) and it will open the command line program DiskPart. You’ll use this to prepare your thumbdrive.
First, type “list disk” and press enter. This will bring up a list of the volumes connected to your computer. You need to determine which is your thumb drive. It should be pretty easy based on the disk size. In my case, I have two 100gb HDD’s, a 2GB SD card for a camera, and the 8GB thumb drive. The thumb drive is disk 3. Use whichever disk your thumbdrive is, and type “Select Disk X”, with X being the number of your drive. This is vitally important. We’re about to format the volume, which will erase everything on it. If you select the wrong disk, you’ll lose all the data on the disk you select. Be EXTRA sure you pick the volume number that corresponds to your thumb drive, and if you fuck up, don’t come bitching to me.
Ok, now we’ve selected the thumb drive. Type “clean” and then hit enter. This will clean the volume.
Now type “create partition primary” and hit enter. This creates a primary partition on your thumb drive.
Now “active” and press enter. This marks the newly created partition as active, so that you can boot from it.
Finally “format fs=fat32″ and press enter. This will format your thumbdrive using the FAT32 file system. It will probably take a few minutes, depending on the size of your drive. Here’s a screenshot of the whole process, so you can compare.
Now you can close diskpart. The next thing you need to do is extract your windows file to the thumb drive.
You’re gonna need a program to extract the files, and the best one I know of is 7zip. 7zip is free, open source, and multiplatform. Download and install it from 7-zip.org. It installs like any other program, so I’ll let you handle that.
Once you have 7zip installed, Hit “Start” and “My Computer” or “Computer” depending on your version of windows. Navigate to where the Windows 7 ISO is located. If it’s on a disc, it will be in your disk drive. If you downloaded it, it will be where ever you saved it.
Right click on it, and you’ll see a new menu option, “7zip”. Hover over it, and another menu will pop up. Click on “Extract Files”
Once you do, you’ll get a popup menu with options to extra the data from your disc image file (ISO). Click on the ellipses (…), and click “Computer”. Navigate down to your thumb drive, and select it as the location to put the extracted files. Should look like this, except with the drive letter of your thumb drive, if it’s different from mine.
This might take a few minutes, depending on the speed of your computer and the speed of your USB drive. You should end up with a USB drive that looks like this.
Now “Safely Remove Hardware” and remove your USB drive. You’re ready to install.
Shut down your netbook and stick the USB drive in it. Boot it up, and go into boot options. On an EeePC, you just tap ESC while it’s booting up and you’ll get a menu. On others, you might need to go into BIOS and change the boot order to make USB first. Select the USB drive from boot menu, and hit enter.
It should start loading windows setup as normal, and from there it’s all the same as installing from a disc.
I actually upgraded my EeePC SSD from the factory 4GB to a Super Talent 16GB unit a few months ago, but I finally got around to doing a how to. As such, I didn’t actually swap anything, the SSD is the same in all the pics.
First, break out your new SSD.
Power your netbook off, and remove the battery. The right side slider should flick to the right and stay there.
Slide the left one to the left, hold it there, and pull the battery toward the rear.
Toward the bottom, you’ll see two phillips screws. Remove them both.
Pry up a little on the access door, and it will pop right out. The SSD is at the top, the ram is at the bottom.
On the right side of the SSD, you’ll see two more phillips screws.
Remove these, and the SSD will pop up, like so:
Slide it out to the right.
Now slide the new one in, and reverse the steps above. Once you get everything buttoned up, install your OS from a thumbdrive or external DVD, and you’re good to go.
