Problem I recently bought an HTC Hero android phone on Orange UK, but couldn't get adb to list it.

After plugging it into several different usb ports, using several different cables, I still couldn't make adb devices list it.

I then spent far more hours than I would care to admit, writing and rewriting /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules according to many conflicting message board posts.

Finding https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/316215/comments/14 made me very nervous that I might have been sold a phone which had adb disabled. Luckily that wasn't the case.

Solution The fault was not with the setup of my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) laptop.

It was the phone. There was a process running (in the background) on the phone called "HTC Sync".

When I killed this process off, the phone's USB id changed from 0bb4:0c01 to 0bb4:0c02 and it all worked perfectly.

I have 'hello world' running on my phone :-)