Manage your android from within Linux, Install Android Tools (ADB, Fastboot, ... & QtADB)

1. Install Android tools

If you don't plan to do some development on your android device, you don't need to install the complete SDK.
Two android-tools packages are now available for Ubuntu. They provide a minimal set of tools like adb and fastboot.
These tools are exactly what you need to root your phone, to flash a ROM, to sideload an application, ...
As these packages are now in Ubuntu official repositories, is has become very easy to install these packages :

# sudo apt-get install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot

2. Update to ADB 1.0.32

Since Android Lollipop 5.0, ADB 1.0.32 is needed to sideload your device.
As Ubuntu repository has still not been updated at the time of this article,  we need to update ADB with latest version found in Google https://skia.googlesource.com/skia/ archives.
This can be done easily with these commands :

# adb version
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.31
# wget -O - https://skia.googlesource.com/skia/+archive/cd048d18e0b81338c1a04b9749a00444597df394/platform_tools/android/bin/linux.tar.gz | tar -zxvf - adb
# sudo mv adb /usr/bin/adb
# sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/adb
# adb version
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.32

You now have latest ADB version which will allow you to handle your Lollipop devices.

3. Install QtADB

QtADB is a powerful graphical Android device manager based on ADB protocol.
QtADB will allow you to :

• have a complete access to your Android device filesystem
• manage your installed applications
• get some device informations (battery level, memory usage, ...)
• take some device display screenshot

3.1. Prerequisite on Phone or Tablet Side

To be able to fully use QtADB with your phone or tablet, the device needs to :

• be rooted
• have busybox installed (without busybox installed, half of QtADB functionalities won't work)

If your phone is running CyanogenMod, you should also allow root access for ADB.
This is done thru Settings / Superuser / Settings

You can test your phone configuration with the following command from your computer :

# adb shell busybox ls -l -a
drwxr-xr-x   16 root     root             0 Mar 30 14:27 .
drwxr-xr-x   16 root     root             0 Mar 30 14:27 ..
drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root             0 Mar 30 14:27 acct
drwxrwxrwt    2 root     root            40 Mar 30 14:27 app-cache
drwxrwx--x    1 system   cache         4096 Mar 31 14:08 cache
...

3.2. Installation

QtADB requires :

• a working ADB installation (done previously)
• Qt libs version 4.7

First step is to install the dependencies. You can then download executable from the site download section and install it.
Select the download package according to your distribution (32bits i386 or 64bits Amd64).

# sudo apt-get install libqtgui4 libqt4-network libqt4-declarative libqt4-opengl
# wget http://bernaerts.dyndns.org/download/ubuntu/adb/QtADB_0.8.1_linux64.tar.gz
# tar -xvf QtADB*.tar.gz
# sudo mv ./QtADB*/QtADB /usr/local/sbin/qtadb
# sudo chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/qtadb
# rm -R QtADB*

QtADB is now installed on your computer.

3.4. Create Application Launcher

Last step is to declare the application to be used by your desktop launcher..
This is done by downloading an application icon and by creating a qtadb.desktop file :

# sudo wget -O /usr/share/icons/qtadb.png http://bernaerts.dyndns.org/download/ubuntu/adb/qtadb.png
# sudo wget -O /usr/share/applications/qtadb.desktop https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NicolasBernaerts/ubuntu-scripts/master/android/qtadb.desktop

You can now launch QtADB and your Android phone filesystem should now fully accessible.
For example, your can take full screenshot of your phone display in one click.


Be careful, you have the full powers !




This article is copied  original author : By Nicolas Bernaerts  original article url : http://bernaerts.dyndns.org/linux/74-ubuntu/328-ubuntu-trusty-android-adb-fastboot-qtadb