Installing the required tools

Even if officially the supported Linux distribution is Ubuntu, the following procedures and commands are equally correct on every Debian-based distribution, if it is actually installed on your computer or is running as a virtual machine.

To be able to acquire the source code, retrieving it from Google git repository, we need to install git. Let's open a Terminal and run:

~$ sudo apt-get install git

Apt will ask for our super user password and will take care of installing git in the system. Once we have git, we need its trusted companion tool—repo. Repo does not need a real installation. It's a Python script, so we just need to download it and place it in a handy folder.

Let's create a bin folder in our home folder and add it to the system path:

~$ mkdir ~/bin
~$ export PATH=~/bin:$PATH

Now that we have a folder, we can download repo using curl:

~$ curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
~$ chmod a+x ~/bin...