ADB

ADB stands for Android Developer Bridge or something like that. On most devices which come with andriod pre-installed it is disabled. Ubuntu Touch wiki has nice guide on enabling ADB on recent Android versions.

To make use of the debugging bridge you will need to connect the device OTG port to your PC and install the adb utility. It comes either with the Andriod SDK or you can install just utility. On distributions using apt:

apt-get install android-tools-adb

Once you have adb installed and your device connected you should be able to see it in device or recovery mode.

adb devices

some other useful commands

adb shell adb shell dmesg > device-kernel-messages.txt adb pull adb push adb remount #should remount system partition so you can push software to it adb logcat #show potentially useful messages about stuff going on in the device adb reboot

You should run adb as root. Running as user should be theoretically possible but does not work for me.