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Few weeks back I updated to the latest Linux Mint offering "Maya" a.k.a Linux Mint 13. Now this is a LTS (Long Term Support) version and I wanted to be in a position to install everything right just so I can keep it for a longer duration and hence have been taking my time configuring stuff.

Last time when I had set up system for Android Development I remember messing up a lot and ending up installing too many things here and there and in the process did learn how to do it properly. I did not document that as a blog as it was too fragmented an experience at that time but this time round I did it properly and everything (well, okay, almost everything) was perfect.

There is lot of material on the web but again that is what led to a less than perfect install last time as it is all disjointed, making the sequence go wrong, using one way for one thing another way for second and ending us with a not so nice experience distracting you from what you want to do, start developing something on android platform or perhaps just get the adb set-up to flash your nexus phone.

So presented below is a guide that will help you prepare your Linux Mint 13 or equivalent distro for you to start android development.

You will notice that these notes do not require downloading "android sdk" separately and that is to save time and effort, trust me.

So the high level steps are:

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I had an old Samsung Galaxy S which was still on stock ROM hence it only ever got to gingerbread and then Samsung just decided not to upgrade and I upgraded the phone so this little gadget was till yesterday destined to live with the old gingerbread.

Then yesterday, I just decided to play around with it and started reading so I know what are my options. Now wiki guide on Cyanogenmod site is quite nicely written but there were one or two steps here and there which had me confused for a little while so here is my usual step-by-step guide on how to go about it.

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I have been using Android Phones and Tablets for quite some time now and have monitored my use for apps that I use on a daily basis and those I would not even come to know if they were removed without my knowledge. So clearly there is a personal perspective on the list below:

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The start of this week was like a nightmare for me. Whole family was down with flu and I had the fever that is probably the highest ever of my entire life at 40.5 C (~ 106 F).

Anyway, surviving that was easier compared to the aftermaths of this health problem that forced me to stay in bed and inadvertently deal with office mails at home on a non-IE browser with Lite version which is crap and makes you feel miserable enough to kill yourself.

So the option I had was to either boot windows on a virtual machine or find a solution within linux. Obviously, I prefer the latter and was glad to work out a solution that can help me avoid booting windows.

I have listed below the steps I followed to achieve this, though in all honesty the documentation is quite good on sourceforge site itself. It's just that some of their screenshots are dated and in French (literally, no pun intended).

Blog has moved to ----> mgw.dumatics.com

In order to display code in a box on my blog, I use the code that I found on the following link:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1385309/looking-for-custom-code-pre-css-styles-in-wordpress?answertab=oldest#tab-top

With thanks to David Thomas who has posted the original code on stackoverflow, presented below are steps to enable the code to appear in block.

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If you read my last post you will know I have been playing with Bodhi Linux lately. One of the selling point for this distro is it's minimalistic approach. However, that also means it doesn't come with some of the media packages that help stream all type of media - stagevu (DivX) included.

Fortunately it does not require lot of effort to get them all working. At-least for me it was quite quick.

The steps I followed are listed below:

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I have an old Sony VAIO which is not in it's best of health and has long been really a companion for my telly, faithfully streaming media from bbc iplayer, youtube, dailymotion and likes. Internet enabled TV arrived in my home long long back :).

Now the thing with this laptop is that it's kinda gimpy - inbuilt keyboard won't work, battery is dead and it hangs on life with constant supply of energy from the AC source on the wall and the one thing that helps me load new OS on this machine - the optical reader - is temperamental and may or may not work and is moody in selecting which CD / DVD it will read and which it won't. It does in particular like CD's authored by Linux Format guys though. Writing is a skill it has forgotten long back and if it reads something, anything I am found celebrating. 

Anyway, I had ubuntu installed on this laptop for quite some time but as this laptop has one more flaw - the nvidia graphic card - and the latest update from ubuntu broke the nvidia drivers which aren't all that well supported anyway, I was being forced to reformat the machine. So I decided to try a new distro named Bodhi Linux which is very cool and uses Enlightenment as desktop which is very very good and way better than Unity and some might argue even Gnome 3.2. However, in order to do so I had to cross the hurdle of burning a CD that my laptop's Optical Drive will find intresting enough to read. 

I have checked and rechecked the BIOS of this laptop and there is no way to make BIOS understand that it can boot from USB. The only options it provides are Hard Drive, Floppy Disk, Optical Reader and Network Boot. None of these were particularly useful for reasons explained above and unfortunately I was hitting the wall. So I started looking for alternative ways to get Bodhi Linux installed. Alternative is what I found in Plop Boot Manager.

Now open source enthusiasts at this point be aware, this nifty piece of software is not open source but it is so useful that this one minor flaw must be completely ignored. It gives you options to boot from USB in several ways - you can burn a CD and fool BIOS to boot from CD onto plop boot manager which in turn allows you to boot from device of your choice aka USB, it can also be put on floppy or the option that I have used - install on hard drive and configured through GRUB.

So presented below without further ado is the guide to how you can install this on your hard drive but before I do so a quick thanks to several boards and posts I referred in the process of making this work: