When I got my first Kindle I had to buy it from the US site. Why? Because I'm an early-adopting, English-preferred-language Brit living in Spain. OK? Google-izing the Kindle HDįirstly, I fail at the first hurdle, installing a file manager app from the Kindle Store.
Different to the point that following this recipe might wreck your Kindle. I used the recipe here on my Kindle delivered from France on – yours might be different.
DISCLAIMER: if you ruin your Kindle doing this, I take no responsibility! It worked for me, it might not work for you. Rooting your Kindle HD is an essential prerequisite for getting Google’s apps installed. Now adb connects, Yay! We can debug and we can root. Disconnect the Kindle, go and switch on ADB in the Security section of the Kindle settings and reconnect the Kindle.The only extra things that I needed to do in order to get debugging going were: A post here suggests that we’re almost good to go already since I already did most of this for the MTP driver. So far so good, save those changes, and go and browse the Extras folder for the Kindle Fire USB Driver.
I went to the Android SDK Manager from the Help menu in Eclipse and added the Amazon Kindle repository ( ) for installing the ADB USB debugger driver for my Ubuntu (12.04 Precise Pangolin). Initially, this looked like being a huge disappointment – I do everything on Ubuntu and only boot Windows if I really, really, really need too which, fortunately is about once every 6 months or so. Some Googling found a guide to get file transfer working. For Ubuntu and requires a, shock, horror, reboot.
Linux users with either a Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HD will need to install a Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) USB driver to complete USB transfers.
To be fair, this is more Google’s fault than Amazon’s since Google switched to the MTP USB protocol for Android 4.x – this screws up the plug and play file transfer with most OS’s. That’s pretty ironic since all Kindle devices are based on Linux and Amazon isn’t afraid to use Linux in many parts of its infrastructure and services. Wow, Amazon didn’t make this easy for Linux people. Here’s some notes on getting started: Transferring Files Between Kindle and Ubuntu With the Kindle I feel rather disconnected from the comfort of my ‘Google experience’, GMail, Play, YouTube, etc. I also have access to a Nexus 7 which is, as we should all know by now, totally awesome. I just got a Kindle Fire HD for testing apps and content that we’re creating for the Kindle platform.