The other day I was installing Ubuntu Touch on my Nexus 7. During the installation process, I encountered an error while using adb (Android Debug Bridge). When I was trying to boot into bootloader using adb, it gave the following error:
error: insufficient permissions for device
What helped me was to restart the adb server in sudo mode.
I am going to show you the steps I used to fix the “insufficient permissions for device error” in Ubuntu Linux.
Fix error: insufficient permissions for device error
First step is to stop the running adb server:
adb kill-server
Next step is to start the server again but this time with root privileges:
sudo adb start-server
The output of this command will be like this:
[email protected]:~$ sudo adb start-server
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
As the last and final step, you must detach the device attached to it and connect it again.
The reason is self-explanatory, I believe. The adb server needs to run with root privileges and if that’s not the case, you see the “insufficient permission for device” error.
On a related topic, I recommend reading about the root user in Ubuntu and clear the concept around this topic.
I hope this quick post helps you. Ciao :)