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Installing Requirements

These instructions use command-line tools. Launch the terminal as you would on any other application. On Windows, launch a regular non-adminstrator instance of the Terminal. Do not use the legacy Command Prompt or adminstrator variant of Terminal.

Use the same terminal for the whole installation process. If you close it, you'll need to start over.

Obtaining Platform Tools​

You need an updated copy of the fastboot and adb tool and the directory containing it needs to be included in the PATH environment variable. You can run fastboot --version to determine the current version. It must be at least 29.0.6. You can use a distribution package for this, but most of them mistakenly package development snapshots of fastboot, clobber the standard version scheme for platform-tools (adb, fastboot, etc.) with their own scheme and don't keep it up-to-date despite that being crucial.

sudo pacman -S android-tools

Using the standalone release of Platform Tools from Google​

To download and extract the standalone release of platform-tools, run the following commands:

sudo apt install libarchive-tools
curl -O https://dl.google.com/android/repository/platform-tools-latest-linux.zip
bsdtar xvf platform-tools-latest-linux.zip

Next, add the directory containing the extracted files to the PATH environment variable:

export PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)/platform-tools

This only changes the PATH environment variable for the current shell.

Checking fastboot version​

Check the output of fastboot --version to make sure the version is at least 29.0.6.

Example of the output of fastboot --version on Arch Linux:

fastboot version 31.0.0p1-android-tools
Installed as /usr/bin/fastboot

Flashing as non-root​

On traditional Linux distributions, you may need to run fastboot as root to flash the device. This is not necessary on macOS or Windows.

On Arch Linux, run the following command:

sudo pacman -S android-udev

On Debian, run the following command:

sudo apt install android-sdk-platform-tools-common