What Is ADB And How To Install It With Android SDKWhen it comes to Android modding, most novice users are confused or left wondering by reference over reference to a certain adb. This is specially true when you are looking up something on modding your device, or root it in particular. ADB is the wonder toy of Android and everyone seems to love it, so lets have a look at understanding what it is and why you need it, and how you can get it. What is ADBADB stands for Android Debug Bridge. It comes as a part of the standard Android SDK, which you can grab here. Basically, it provides a terminal based interface for interacting with your phones file system. Since Android platform is based on Linux, command line is the only way to obtain and manipulate root access often required to perform certain advanced operations on your device using root access. While these things can be done directly on the device itself using some terminal emulator, it will be rather difficult to execute complex commands on such a small screen. ADB provides the bridge between your machine and your computer. How To Install ADBStep 1 Installing the Android SDKNote At the time of updating this guide, the latest version of the Android SDK available is r. The tools will work the same way however, even if you get a later version. In case of earlier versions though, the location of some of the tools was different and it is recommended that you get the latest available version. The first step is to download the SDK. Use the link given at the end of this post and download the latest version of the Android SDK from there. There are versions available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. In case of Windows, both an installer and a zip file are available but there isnt any need to use the installer as a formal installation is not required. Once you have downloaded the SDK, simply extract the compressed file to a location on your computer. In our case, we have extracted it to the root of our C drive and that makes C android sdk windows the installation location of the SDK. From here onwards, we shall be referring to this location as the SDK folder. Step 2 Downloading the SDK Platform Tools. Previously, ADB used to be included in the SDK by default in the tools sub folder but now, it has been relocated to the platform tools sub folder which needs to be downloaded as an SDK package. Fortunately, this is quite easy Just browse to the SDK folder and launch SDK Manager. When launching it for the first time, it will present you with a window to choose packages to install. The first option begins with Android SDK Platform tools. Make sure it is checked, and uncheck all the other packages for now. If youre away from home and in need of WiFi, now Facebook can help you find it. Originally only available in a few countries, the social networks Find WiFi. You can checkuncheck a package by clicking on its name and then selecting the AcceptReject radio button. Your window should look like this Now simply click Install and wait till the platform tools are installed. Once the process is done, you will have a platform tools folder inside your SDK folder. That folder will include ADB and all its dependencies. Step 3 Setting the Path variable. Now you have ADB installed but using it this way will require you to either use the complete path of the ADB command C android sdk windowsplatform toolsadb or to first change directory to the platform tools subfolder of the SDK folder each time, and this can become quite a hassle. To make ADB along with other Android SDK tools and platform tools easily accessible from anywhere at the command line, we shall add their paths to the PATH environment variable. This method will apply to Windows users only. If you are a Linux or Mac user, add the tools and platform tools sub folders of the Android SDK to your systems PATH variable using the standard method for your operating system. If you have no experience with editing system environment variables, make a System Restore point now so that you can revert back to it in case something goes wrong. If you are using Windows 7, right click the Computer icon and click Properties. Now click Advanced System Settings from the options in the left pane to bring up the System Properties window. Windows XP users will directly get this window when they right click My Computer and click Properties. In the System Properties window, click the Environment Variables button on the Advanced tab. Find Path in the System variables section and double click it to edit it. Make sure NOT to delete the existing entry in Variable value or it will mess up things on your computer. Just add the following string to the end of it, including both the semi colons c android sdk windowstools c android sdk windowsplatform tools. If you have extracted the SDKs contents to another directory, make sure to use that one for your PATH variable. After adding the string, this is what my Path variable looks like C Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWindows Live C Program Files x. Common FilesMicrosoft SharedWindows Live System. Rootsystem. 32 System. Root System. RootSystem. Wbem SYSTEMROOTSystem. Windows. Power. Shellv. C Program Files x. ATI TechnologiesATI. ACECore Static C Program Files x. Windows LiveShared C Program FilesJavajdk. C Program Files x. Javajdk. 1. 6. 02. C android sdk windowstools C android sdk windowsplatform tools. Dont worry if yours does not include some of the other text what is important is the way the new entry should be added to the existign one, and the way the previous entries MUST be left unchanged. Notice that the semi colons are necessary to separate each path variable entry from the next and previous ones. Once you have added the path, your machine may require a reboot. In case you messed up while editing the Path variable and ended up deleting the previously existing entries, just restore the System Restore point you made and retry, being more careful this time. Step 4 Installing the USB drivers. Finally, you need to install the USB drivers. You may or may not need to perform this step, depending on your device. If you are using a device that ships with stock Android operating system such as the Nexus One, this will be necessary. In case of other devices that ship with their custom version of Android and some tools to sync the device with the PC, such as devices from HTC that ship with HTC Sync or devices by Samsung that ship with Samsungs own software, the suitable driver for your device will be automatically installed with that software package. The first step will be to download the USB drivers. To do this, launch SDK Manager from the SDK folder and click on Available packages in the left pane. Expand Third party Add ons followed by Google Inc. Google Usb Driver package, as shown in this image Click Install Selected and in the window that pops up, click the Accept all radio button followed by the Install button. Wait patiently while the USB drivers are downloaded and installed in the Android SDK. The drivers for both 3. SDK folder under usbdriverx. Now that the USB drivers have been downloaded, you can install them to your computer as follows On the device, go to home screen, press Menu, select Applications Development, and enable USB Debugging. Now connect your phone to the PC via USB. New hardware installation should kick in, and it will start looking for the drivers. Manually point the drivers to the folder suitable for your operating system and let them install. Once drivers have installed, you can verify successful installation by going to Device Manager. Your phone should be showing under ADB Interface, like in this example How to Use ADBAt this point, the setting is done. Here on you can simply use adb to manipulate your phone in whatever way you like. On Windows, the best way to do so is using command prompt. To ensure that adb has been set up properly, run command prompt and type adb devices and hit enter. Your connected device should show up with a serial number. This is it for this guide. We would like to emphasize that playing with your phone at this level can be dangerous if you dont know what you are doing, and can even render the phone completely useless. Please do it at your own risk. For a complete list of adb commands, check out the official adb guide here. Download Android SDKEditors Note ADB is for advanced users only. If you need ADB with a Graphical User Interface, check out Qt. ADB. SUBSCRIBE TO OURNEWSLETTER. Install Eclipse Plugins The Easy Way. Eclipse as of today is the industrys major non Microsoft software tool platform. The number of companies adopting this platform is a testimonial of the platforms success. Check my previous post for more on the history of Eclipse IDEEclipse has a well designed, and extensible architecture. What is valuable about Eclipse is that it provides an open source platform for creating an extensible integrated development environment. This platform allows anyone to build tools that integrate seamlessly with the environment and other tools. The key to the seamless integration of tools with Eclipse is the plug in. With the exception of a small run time kernel, everything in Eclipse is a plug in. This means that a plug in you develop integrates with Eclipse in exactly the same way as other plug ins. Any new person who is introduced to Eclipse in concerned with one important question How to Install Eclipse Plugins There are lot of useful, high quality third party plugins available and all the plugin installation instructions specify at most 2 ways to install Eclipse Plugins. Normal Ways of Installing Eclipse Plugin. I will take the Eclipse Webtools Plugin to describe the 2 normal ways of installing Eclipse Plugins. In the next section I will show how the same can be done in a easy way. This is how the Eclipse SDK folder structure looks like After extracting the Webtools package you have this folder hierarchy One of the common method of installing is to copy the contents of the features into the features folder of eclipse, and do the same with the plugins folder. The other way of installing, which Eclipse also recommends is via the Update Manager. You can choose the components you wish to install, choose the dependent plugins etc. In this process, generally you select the default installation location specified by the wizard. The advantage with this approach is that when you select a component you are also made aware of the dependentplugins that needs to be installed. For e. g. If I select Web Tools, I am also told to selectinstall GEFThe disadvantage with this approach is that it never works well in a low bandwidth environment. I have struggled so many times to install via update manager, somewhere its gets stuck and I am left with a partially installed, corrupted environment. The Easy Way. Now for the Easy way of installing Eclipse Plugins. Very few people are aware of this concept and Eclipse somehow doesnt seem to document this approach anywhere. This method uses the concept of Links. Here is the step by step procedure. In the explanation I have used the installation of Webtools as the example1. Create a folder named links inside the eclipse folder See Picture below2. Create a new file inside this folder and name it as say wtp. Note that the file name can be any valid string, but the extension has to be link. Assuming that I have copied the Web tools into D thirdparty as shown below,the contents of wtp. D thirdpartywtp. Points to Note The string should alwaysstart with path keyword. The path should point to a directory which has a eclipse folder which in turn has features and plugins as sub folders. It is recommended to use forward slash in the path If you want use Backslash, see that you use the escape character i. Windows it should be The file extension shouldend with linkThe file i. It is recommended to create linkfilesonly for big pluginsapplications. For small plugins you can create just one link file, say misc. Restart Eclipse and now all the plugins and feature descriptions should be read from the path referred by the link files. Advantages. Eclipse has a lot of top level and technology projects. To experiment with these projects, the links concept comes to the rescue. You can extract the plugin to a thirdparty or a folder of your choice and just link it within the eclipse installation. My current configuration looks like this Eclipse ProjectsThird Party Plugins. Corresponding Link files. The Copy approach just bloats the eclipse installation and you cannot removeuninstall the plugin easily. With links approach, you can just remove the link file and the plugin is uninstalled The same links directory can be used in another eclipse installation. For e. g. if you are working with Milestone or different version of Eclipse, you can just copy the links folder containing. It is very easy to manage different versions of a plugin. If a new version doesnt work, reverting back to a previous version is pretty easy. Also, if you use the update feature in Eclipse, you can choose one of the above folders as the installation directory. Conclusion. This approach seems to work fine in both windows and linux. I am not sure why this approach is not documented in Eclipse. I found out about this when I was using the trial version of RAD Rational Application Developer. It was used primarily to manage product extensions. I believe the same concept can be used to manage plugins InstallUninstall. Using Dropins to install Eclipse plugins. One of the problems with the above link approach is the plugin dependency resolution. This has to be take care of manually by the plugin installer. If the install is done via the UI, it manage to find and install all the dependencies. Staring from Eclipse 3. Eclipse SDK has a new provisioning system called Equinoxp. Equinoxp. 2GettingStartedp. Eclipse platform ships with one such default watched directory called dropins. The dropins folder is configured to be scanned during startup, and for changes to be immediately applied to the running system. Thus the dropins folder can be used much like the plugins directory was used in the past. A subtle twist on old behavior here is that plug ins and features added to the dropins folder are properly installed into the system rather than being forced in. This means p. 2 has an opportunity to confirm that the new plug in doesnt conflict with other installed plug ins, and it can even go out and fetch any missing prerequisites of the newly dropped in plug ins. This also means you can later use the GUI to install extra functionality that depends on the plug ins in the dropins folder, since p. In other words, new plug ins installed via the dropins folder behave exactly like plug ins installed via the user interface. Supported dropin formats 1. You can just drop the plugin jar in the dropins folder. You can also drop in the traditional Eclipse application or extension layout directly in the dropins folder. You can add an additional layer of folders immediately below the dropins folder that contain traditional Eclipse extensions. Or you can add link files as in the Eclipse links folder. Hope this post was useful, if you had any problems using this approach, do leave a comment with the problem description. Thanks to Bryan Solan for the Dropins reference.
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