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Hello all so Im new to android I came over from BB I got sick of the worthless OS they keep updating. Im trying to get up to speed everything with android. I got root last night using the unevoked's new process. As Im reading different threads I keep hearing people refer to adb shell. What is this? I also have a PC and a MAC but I'm more of a Mac guy, is most the stuff you need to do better done on PC or can it be done on Mac's because they talk about opening a command line which of course is done in DOS. Can anyone shed light on this for me? Thanks in advance
adb is a part of the Google Android SDK. http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html It's available for Mac, PC, or Linux. Really, it boils down to preference. I believe setup is easier for Linux and Macs, but it's still pretty easy for a PC.
You can use Terminal, or whatever. It just needs a command-line interface for you to type into.
Thank you for the link and the explanation. I think its been to long since Ive had a open source device im way behind the curve i guess. Is there a good thread or a site for someone like me to start at that will start at the beginning and explain what SDK is and everything else?
Firstly, for a general how to of what's going on with our device, adb, so on and so forth, this thread is pretty awesome:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=709220
For a more in depth explanation of development and the like hit up:
http://developer.android.com
For the vast majority of what you're going to be doing, you need to be pretty familiar with command line scripts and the like. Also, if you want to write applications, you'll need to know java. If you really aren't all that interested in developing and just want to know about adb, that first link is a pretty good crash course.
I have been trying to learn how to do some android development for work and keep running into problems. I find it hard to believe that people are able to create a lot of these apps with the Google development tools in such poor condition.
I have set up a development system with eclipse and the android tools. One of the first problems I ran into is ADB crashing whenever I tried to debug and there was a device attached to the system. Didn't matter if I was trying to debug on the device or emulator, ADB would crash. I was finally able to get the problem fixed by using the Composite ADB interface driver instead of the plain ADB interface (would it really hurt Google to add one sentence to the directions to tell people this?)
Now every time I go to debug, the emulator comes up in Chinese/Japaneses. I type in English and it converts it. I can fix it by changing the input method, but I have to do it every time I start the emulator. I have Googled looking for a solution and have found this is a known problem that has been around for almost a year and there is no resolution with it. The bug reports I have found on the android site even lists them still as NEW!
When trying to debug a problem, I wanted to delete the shared preference file for the app as it seems like it had become corrupted and every time it went to read it, the app would force close. (And when this happen, the debugger perspective would come up but for the life of me, I could not find any information as to what caused the fault or any sort of stack trace to look back and see where in my code it failed).
If you are an app developer, are you running into these issues? Have you found ways to work around the problems? I just can't believe that this is the way people develop for this platform. I'm ready to tell my boss that we forget about the platform unless we can find some stable development tools, otherwise we will be spending more time fighting with the tools than working on the app.
If anyone has any suggestions, I would really like to hear them. I'm not a noob when it comes to software development (20+ years as a software engineer), but I have never seen development tools for such a major platform, be this poorly done. What am I missing?
I'm a professional developer as well too. 20 years or so as a C/C++ developer, but I've worked most of my career as a Unix developer. Naturally, I use linux where possible and my Eclipse setup on Gentoo linux is pretty stable. I tried on Win7-64 but it was buggy as heck. I believe that the problem is with Java. There seems to be so many ways to set it up wrong that I'm not sure you can set it up right under windows.
I find it ironic that Oracle is trying to sue Google for making a JVM that actually works!
I havent had any of your mentioned issues. I am running eclipse on a 32 vista machine and a 64 bit windows 7 machine.
Not sure what I may have done different that you for setup. But I followed the Android application development for dummies book. The author goes step by step of what to download and how to install and configure. Even though your software experience is way beyond this book maybe its worth picking it up to read the install notes.
FreeTheWorld said:
I havent had any of your mentioned issues. I am running eclipse on a 32 vista machine and a 64 bit windows 7 machine.
Not sure what I may have done different that you for setup. But I followed the Android application development for dummies book. The author goes step by step of what to download and how to install and configure. Even though your software experience is way beyond this book maybe its worth picking it up to read the install notes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I picked up the book, "Sams Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours" and it has a section for setting up the environment too. Followed it to the letter several times and always had this problems. I think the issue comes down to the books were written using version 6 and 7 of the SDK and the current version, 8, has introduced some problems the books don't cover. For example, the tools directory has been split into two directories, tools and platform-tools. When you first download the SDK, you don't get everything you had like before until you update the SDK.
I have talked to several other people who also had the problem with the ADB crashing like I did, even started a thread here about it. No one could get any help anywhere on resolving the issue. I think the problems I have that others don't see is because they started with an earlier version of the SDK.
Gene Poole said:
I'm a professional developer as well too. 20 years or so as a C/C++ developer, but I've worked most of my career as a Unix developer. Naturally, I use linux where possible and my Eclipse setup on Gentoo linux is pretty stable. I tried on Win7-64 but it was buggy as heck. I believe that the problem is with Java. There seems to be so many ways to set it up wrong that I'm not sure you can set it up right under windows.
I find it ironic that Oracle is trying to sue Google for making a JVM that actually works!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have also setup the development platform on a linux system and haven't had the problems I have with Windows 7 64bit. I also feel a lot of the problems have come from the Windows 64bit platform and even windows in general. I tried installing on a clean 64bit and 32bit Windows 7 and was still having the ADB problem. As soon as I get my tax refunds, I'm going to get a work desk setup at home so I can try using my linux system (it sits on the floor with no monitor and is my network server). Boss will really love it if I tell him we have to set up linux platforms to develop on. Guy is a bit of a tight wad when it comes to equipment.
edboston said:
If you are an app developer, are you running into these issues?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nope, I didn't have any stability problems with SDK. I use linux 32-bit, didn't try to work on a Windows, MacOS and/or 64-bit arch.
I've not seen any of your problems, either.
FYI, I followed these instructions to set up the env:
http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html
(Environment - WinXP/32 netbook)
Eclipse is buggy. The most annoying issue with it is that the auto complete freezes your computer at times.
An alternative is IntelliJ. They offer a free community addition. I work with one dev that swears by it.
I use Windows7x64 and Ubuntu 10.10 to develop my apps. I use IntelliJ mostly because I find Eclipse to be convoluted overcomplicated mess. I think the Android integration in Eclipse is better, especially around editing some of the key XML files but I despise how projects are organized in Eclipse.
The OS you use really doesn't matter the results are the same, once you're up and running the work will be the same so the OS becomes irrelevant. The IDE becomes the differentiator.
I haven't met with the issues you mentioned, but as you said it can be because I installed the sdk a long time ago (after google anounced the eclair). I'm using eclipse and yes, that program is full of bugs, but I read an article about developing for android in Netbeans (my personal favorite). You can read it here: http://androidportal.hu/2011-01-09/fejlesztes-androidra-netbeans-segitsegevel (it's hungarian, but google translate is our friend)
Sent from my GT-I5700 using XDA App
MotoDev Studio 2.01
stick to 32-bit Galileo
for the slow autocomplete problem, I've made sure to use eclipse Galileo, something in Helios was causing massive lag. Also make sure you're running the 32-bit version of eclipse, even if your machine is 64-bit, there are definitely some bugs last time I tried to install ADT on 64-bit eclipse.
the new tools directory was a bit of a pain after updating to the latest API but nothing too bad once you figured it out.
I haven't had many of the other problems you mentioned. I always debug with adb logcat from terminal, and you can always hop into the device with adb shell.
I use eclipse every day at work so I've kind of gotten used to all the little quirks. I had the chinese text problem with the emulator, but I do most of my testing on a real phone. I use the emulator just to try out different resolutions.
Hello everybody!
I have been playing with the ARM port of Ubuntu and my Archos 70 for a few days now and I got it to boot and login on a root account.
Not a lot of things work. The touchscreen, sound, hardware buttons and 3d don't work (I'm guessing this since Unity doesn't work).
You don't imagine the pain that I had to suffer to get here without input of any kind.
Everything else seems to work fine, slow but fine (X, gnome, etc).
Things that I haven't tried yet are the webcam, the HDMI, the SD reader and the USB (which would help me a lot to get things working faster)
I'll update my post with pics and a link to download the image when it's done uploading.
For those who have been longer on the Archos community or have some experience I would ask you to give me some advice to get the touchscreen working.
Update :(12/03/2011)
Sroll down for a link and instructions on how to install it (The touchscreen works in this new image)
afaik touchscreen is connected by usb internally. check dmesg of android and figure out which driver you need and build/download/whatever it to ubuntu
Thanks! That's actually a great idea. I never thought about that
I did what you told me and it revealed that the screen is a Unitec USB Touch (Win7) with a 227d:0709 ID. I haven't found any information online except for this which isn't that informative either: lii-enac.fr/en/architecture/linux-input/multitouch-devices .html
is it not an option to re-build(and probably modify) the driver based on the gen8 source? looks to me that it is in the source package(gen8gpl-froyo/linux/drivers/input/touchscreen).
@veenstrac of course, as long as there is no ARM assembler code included it shouldn't be that hard to port it to an ubuntu kernel. except for the bit that ubuntu uses a newer kernel (2.6.3x) than archos (2.6.29). maybe some APIs need to be modified to get it compiled and working
I finally got the touchscreen working!
I didn't need to compile any drivers or anything. Just by changing the evdev configuration worked!
The problem now is that I can't "click" the mouse properly (when I do it it stays "pressed" forever) and also that X crashes after a while...
Alexroc94 said:
I finally got the touchscreen working!
I didn't need to compile any drivers or anything. Just by changing the evdev configuration worked!
The problem now is that I can't "click" the mouse properly (when I do it it stays "pressed" forever) and also that X crashes after a while...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What did you do to modify it and get it to work? I have the same touch screen and I've tried a number of things to the evdev config and none seem to make any difference.
this sounds cool anything i can do to help?
If anyone knows how the evdev can be modified to make this work, can they please share this with the rest of the world? I've tried to no avail. I would really like to be able to use UNR, but it's worthless without a touch screen on a touch screen only device.
I'm sorry I didn't respond to any of the later posts. I had a really terrible week full of exams ...
Anyway, I will be working on Ubuntu this weekend to see if I can solve the rest of the problems (wifi not working, sound not working, crashes ....). But for those who want to try I uploaded the image to Dropbox. Please give me some feedback: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3122179/rootfs.img
Once you have downloaded it you have to install the SDL and replece the Angstrom img with this one. (It won't work if you have the Urukdroid intramfs).
So yeah. Good luck with that and thanks in advance to those who give me some feedback
Hey
I would like to help you out, just one question, are you using the netbook edition or is it the desktop one?
It's Ubuntu Netbook Edition but I make it boot to the "normal" desktop since Unity needs 3D to work.
The graphic card is another thing I am working on since it would be better to use Unity in these kind of devices.
Hello,
If you want to try Linux on Android (for me, A101), you can try old method (with chroot) on Android rooted device (for me, Chulri root method); it's very easy to boot Debian or Ubuntu while Android is running:
link 1 http://www.saurik.com/id/10
link 2 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=899037
But for me, it's just for fun, not to work with this linux. But it works.
hum hum
Hello all,
may i resume or i am wrong if i say :
What super_sonic says allow to boot Ubuntu "inside" Android and get wifi, touchscreen and 3D working
What you propose with your rootfs.img is to get Ubuntu running really on the tab but unfortunatly with no wifi for the moment
I don't know if this can help but i was folllowing the same type of work here :
ttp://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=47869
Thanks guy for all the WORK you are doing
Yes, that sounds great! Will test it as soon as possible!
double post
Sorry for posting again, but i must precise i can not publish links here so the "http" and more is missed on each URL, those links might be helpful for you guys :
forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=47869
.openaos.org/archives/152
be lucky
tazarus said:
Hello all,
may i resume or i am wrong if i say :
What super_sonic says allow to boot Ubuntu "inside" Android and get wifi, touchscreen and 3D working
What you propose with your rootfs.img is to get Ubuntu running really on the tab but unfortunatly with no wifi for the moment
I don't know if this can help but i was folllowing the same type of work here :
ttp://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=47869
Thanks guy for all the WORK you are doing
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks dude! I really appreciate when what I do is useful for someone!
And yeah the guy from the archosfans forum it's me
Dropbox has suspended my account for using too much bandwith. So if you want to try it I hope I will have a new version by Monday on another server.
one more
Thanks,
don't worry for your img, i get it just before they closed your DropBox
I found one more guy trying to put Debian on A101
3w.dev.katlea-studio.com/home.html?PHPSESSID=fik67vlp0mv9c59pg8cm5pt0c3
he says "About wifi: ability to connect and make a ping but the internet does not work. I try to solve this quickly."
good luck again
tazarus said:
I found one more guy trying to put Debian on A101
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
He succeeded actually.
cf. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1000081
Hi All,
I'm a software developer, reasonably comfortable with compiling apps in Linux, though still got more to learn on inner workings of the full system.
I've been thinking about following the Linux from Scratch book for a while - and also about converting my Nook e-reader into a useful device for developing on when out im the sun.
I guess there are some significant challenges here - device trees and commercial secrets, perhaps some crypto keys used for signing update images to boot (I'm familiar with these problems, but not solutions or good workarounds).
What I'd really like is a good understanding of:
- what tool chain I need to setup
- What has been tried already and what the problems were
- any further help/datasheets that can get me going
I'd have posted this in the 'android development' area as the closest forum for what l'm trying to do, but apparently I'm not allowed until I've got my post count up - so I'm being forced to post in 'general'. If someone agrees and can move it, that would be great.
P.s. I have searched the xda site, but I'm not finding what I'm looking for. I'm sure it must be here somewhere, so any pointers/links on where it is would be appreciated.
SimonSimpson said:
Hi All,
I'm a software developer, reasonably comfortable with compiling apps in Linux, though still got more to learn on inner workings of the full system.
I've been thinking about following the Linux from Scratch book for a while - and also about converting my Nook e-reader into a useful device for developing on when out im the sun.
I guess there are some significant challenges here - device trees and commercial secrets, perhaps some crypto keys used for signing update images to boot (I'm familiar with these problems, but not solutions or good workarounds).
What I'd really like is a good understanding of:
- what tool chain I need to setup
- What has been tried already and what the problems were
- any further help/datasheets that can get me going
I'd have posted this in the 'android development' area as the closest forum for what l'm trying to do, but apparently I'm not allowed until I've got my post count up - so I'm being forced to post in 'general'. If someone agrees and can move it, that would be great.
P.s. I have searched the xda site, but I'm not finding what I'm looking for. I'm sure it must be here somewhere, so any pointers/links on where it is would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have tried to get info on such things three times over 2 years for different devices, no one every seems to point me in the right direction, the most i have been able to find out is how to make compile cm and a little bit of how to customize roms, not to be a downer but i think the process is often so different for ever device and difficulties usually happen that the only people that build roms are people that have either have experience I n some form from their job, just edit existing source for cm(updating to a new version, customizing roms ect...) or have screwed with the stuff for years till the point that they just figured out alot of problems themselves. Wish a could find a good guide myself to atleast get the basic dependencies required for a device to boot together, if i could get something to boot the rest of the issues could be worked out with trial and error, boot noone on xda, Android authority, Reddit or cm's own forums goes into enough depth to make that possible.
Hi jaykoerner,
Thanks for your reply - good to know I'm not alone with my echo!
I've discovered some useful links if anyone wants to begin getting to grips with all this...
1. XDA Devs has a wiki (not sure how to find from the forum links...?)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/BN_Nook_Simple_Touch
2. There's a (atleast one) customized kernel (and probably a dev-tool chain) available on GitHub:
https://github.com/javifo/NST/tree/master/kernel -- including kernel compilation instructions
https://github.com/javifo/NST -- root of the repository.
3. Parallel to Raspberry Pi kernel compilation (so you may want to learn from that as it probably has more articles)
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/kernel/building.md
I'll post more when I next do something with the information (Still want to understand more on the android HAL)
Hope that helps someone!
SS.
SimonSimpson said:
Hi jaykoerner,
Thanks for your reply - good to know I'm not alone with my echo!
I've discovered some useful links if anyone wants to begin getting to grips with all this...
1. XDA Devs has a wiki (not sure how to find from the forum links...?)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/BN_Nook_Simple_Touch
2. There's a (atleast one) customized kernel (and probably a dev-tool chain) available on GitHub:
https://github.com/javifo/NST/tree/master/kernel -- including kernel compilation instructions
https://github.com/javifo/NST -- root of the repository.
3. Parallel to Raspberry Pi kernel compilation (so you may want to learn from that as it probably has more articles)
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/kernel/building.md
I'll post more when I next do something with the information (Still want to understand more on the android HAL)
Hope that helps someone!
SS.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My initial thought was that toolchain should match the underlay Linux kernel of Eclair (2.6.x.y) for us to be sure it could be run on NST. This info that I still have to search through is certainly helpful. Thanks!
SimonSimpson said:
I guess there are some significant challenges here - device trees and commercial secrets, perhaps some crypto keys used for signing update images to boot...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Neither the NST or the newer glows use device trees.
In the Glows this is all handled by the custom ntxconfig which allows simple configuration.
For building Android apps, you use the straight Android SDK, possibly also the Android NDK (for native code).
You'd also use the NDK for building command line utilities.
I've never built a kernel from scratch, but I have binary modified/patched them.
There is the simpler bit of patching system image ramdisks which can be conviently handled by my imgutil.exe in the signature.
If you want to do audio, you really are better off with the Glow4 (7.8") which actually supports it.
I've looked around on stack overflow and other places trying to find answers. I have software I want to install on my phone so I can more easily chat, send files, links, etc. on LANs that I work within throughout my day. This program works well for me: https://www.beebeep.net/download
I can use this on my windows and linux boxes. I want to integrate my phones into this communications array.
I'm looking at the snapcraft or any of the other linux variants. I can't figure out how to run a linux app on droid.
I can ssh through the terminal and so on. I can perform other functions that one normally does in BASH though now that I think of it, I haven't tried crontab. Anyway, how could I get this BeeBeep script to work on my android? Can anyone help solve this problem?
I have not seen anything on this, but very interested in this Linux development...
I did see an XDA section for only Ubuntu Touch...
I don't know about direct onto android but apparently it can be done to Chromebooks and I know that android apps can be converted to work on Chromebooks too so perhaps it can be reversed?
https://www.androidcentral.com/how-install-linux-apps-your-chromebook
So basically if an app could be converted to work on a Chromebook could it then be further converted to work on Android?
Seems like a long shot but you never know.
I've seen Windows apps / games work on Android, I've had Wolfenstein, quake arena and doom 3 ports on my phone so I would assume that Linux being a much closer cousin to Android would be an easier chore.
What you need is a framework to do the work for you, not to emulate but to directly port..
Can't find much online but I think if you dig enough you may find something
Certainly interesting though, best of luck pal.
If I find something, I'll post in development. This is a backburner project, but clearly it's one I need to take on myself. Thanx for your responses.