ADB or Android Debug Bridge is a way for a smartphone to communicate with PC. Using ADB, we can communicate with an Android smartphone from the system CLI. It’s part of Google Android SDK as well.
Fastboot, on the other hand is basically a diagnostic tool used to make changes to the android smartphone file system by issuing commands from a system CLI, when the device is in bootloader mode. It is used to perform updates or performs installations, like for example, flashing a ROM or a custom bootloader, etc.
Both of these tools are very important for Android Developers as well as Android Enthusiasts. In this tutorial, we are going to discuss how we can install ADB & Fastboot on Ubuntu systems. We can also install Google Android SDK and that will also install these on the system but if you are not planning for any android development, then you don’t really need the SDK & its very huge in size as well. We will only install the required things, so let’s start the tutorial.
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Install ADB & FastBoot on Ubuntu
Packages for both ADB & Fastboot are available in the default Ubuntu package repositories & we are not required to install any other repository for the same, thus making installation a bit easier. So to install ADB & FastBoot on Ubuntu, we need to execute the following command from the system terminal,
$ sudo apt-get install android-tools-fastboot android-tools-adb
Now once the installation finishes, we can make sure that adb is installed by executing the command to check it’s version,
$ adb version
Starting ADB
By default, the ADB server is disabled & we need to start the adb server to start using it. To start the adb server, use the following command,
$ sudo adb start-server
Checking ADB connection
So now we can connect our Android device to the Ubuntu system to test the ADB connection. But before connecting the device to the system, we must have ‘USB DEBUGGING ENABLED’ on our android device. You can find the option for the same by going into the Android device settings ( It’s under ‘Developer Options’).
Now once that’s enabled, all we have to do is to connect our Android device to the Ubuntu system using the USB cable. Once the device has been connected, open the terminal on your system & execute the following command,
$ adb devices
This will generate a pop-up on your device to allow USB Debugging, enable it & then execute the same command again. This time, we should see our device in the output for the command on the Ubuntu terminal. That’s it, you have done & this concludes our tutorial on how to install ADB & FastBoot on Ubuntu systems. Please do send in any questions or queries using the comment box below.
