Getting ADB (Android Debugger) to work on Ubuntu 10.04+

In my spare time I enjoy writing Android applications and exploring the vast Android SDK. Though I have not yet published any apps to the Market, I have a few going through final QA testing which will be released soon.

Often times, I will need to get an adb shell, watch the logfiles on the phone, or want push my apps to my devices for testing or debugging on a real device. I do most of my coding in my spare time on my laptop which was running Ubuntu 10.04, and any time I tried to open adb it wouldn't connect to the device. I would just see "????????" as the serial number and "no permissions" as the device name. As a result, I have been having to use my workstation which runs Ubuntu 9.10 for all of my debugging.

I upgraded early to Ubuntu 10.10 as I often like to test the latest Ubuntu betas and release candidates. I was also hoping the latest release would fix my issue, which unfortunately, was not the case. So I started out on a quest to get to the bottom of things.

It didn't take long to discover that it's a permissions issue, and the recommended fix I found repeatedly was to kill adb server and restart it as root. I quickly tested that and surely it worked, however that doesn't work so well for starting it via Eclipse and ADT and I never want to run a program as root without good reason.

It works in 9.10, it's just a permissions issue, so I thought a quick change to the new hal rules in Ubuntu were in order, but I couldn't find any such documentation on the workings of hal and its permissions. Lots of digging around and I found a comment on XDA with a udev rule. Opened up the terminal and typed 'lsusb -v | grep 0bb4' and sure enough that was the correct vendor id for my HTC Evo.

So here are the steps I took to get it working:

echo "SUBSYSTEM==\"usb\", SYSFS{idVendor}==\"0bb4\", MODE=\"0666\"" | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

sudo restart udev

I hope that helps you. If you need to find your devices vendor id you can try this:

$ sudo lsusb -v | grep -C5 Android 2>/dev/null
  bMaxPacketSize0        64
  idVendor           0x0bb4 High Tech Computer Corp.
  idProduct          0x0c8d 
  bcdDevice            2.26
  iManufacturer           1 HTC
  iProduct                2 Android Phone
  iSerial                 3 HT05JHL0XXXX
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2

P.S. Please feel free to add your device and vendor id in the comments to save others some trouble.