Sunday, July 31, 2011

Success! My Toshiba Thrive is now talking to my computers!

I'll say it again: it shouldn't be this hard. Toshiba really needs to provide better and more complete information to help a developer setup a Thrive tablet to work with Android's adb server. With that out of the way, here is what I found to work for me, and what I'm describing should work for anyone with any Android device.


For my Windows PC running XP, this page held the answer. But be sure to read the comments, especially those of Dan and HMishkoff. The value to be used depends on the vendor of your device. There is a nice list of all the vendors here.


So that got me up and running with Windows, so I turned next to my Ubuntu Linux box. That setup is rather different, but not too difficult either. Fortunately, the USB drivers are already there. What needs to be done is to configure the udev rules file which should be created (or modified if it exists), in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory. This page has pretty good instructions which worked well for me.



Scroll down to the comment from jerichod. It's brilliant! Not only does he tell you how to modify the .rules file, he gives you the background and a couple of commands to make it so much easier to figure out. So I took his work and created a rules file with all currently-known vendors in it, and made it available here.



All you should need to do is copy this file to /etc/udev/rules.d, modify the owner and group values to what is suitable on your machine, save the file, then connect your device using USB. This last part is critical and tripped me up for a while. It's also not mentioned in the above instructions. After you change the .rules file, you need to connect the device for udev to use the new values from the file. If your device is already connected when you change the file, you need to disconnect it, then connect it again.


And that should do it! For anyone with a Mac, it's supposed to just work. I'll try that later, and if it doesn't just work, I'll post a follow-up with those instructions.

My new Toshiba Thrive Android tablet

I now own an Android tablet, a Toshiba Thrive to be precise. I've used an iPad 1 before, but this is my first Android tablet. There are some things I really like about it, such as the maps and turn-by-turn navigation (even though this is just a WiFi model). However, there are a couple of things that I don't like at all.

The first big problem is the not-waking-from-sleep problem, that appears to afflict many Thrives. Lots of complaints voiced online, no solutions from Toshiba, yet. Very surprising since it's a basic function that really ought to work if you're going to ship the product. The latest news is that an update will push out next week to fix this. Let's hope so.

The bigger problem, from my point of view at least, is that I cannot easily get it to talk to my Android development environment on Windows XP. And here's where I'm starting to worry: I found a little tidbit of information on the Toshiba site http://tabletsupport.toshiba.com/ that said Toshiba does not support the SDK and doesn't plan to. Uh oh. I'm scouring the web for helpful tips and think I may have found a few. Also, I have Ubuntu and MacOS here at the house so might be able to get it working with a different computer.

More news later...