Ubuntu Teen
HomeAbout

Install Android SDK (and Emulator) in Ubuntu

As I explained in my previous post, you can run an emulated version of Android, on either your Windows, Linux or Mac system. The emulator comes with the SDK (Software Development Kit) from Google, and is very easy to setup and install. Here is a guide to install this in Ubuntu 8.04/8.10.

1) Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in (entering your password when asked):

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin

If you are running Ubuntu 64-bit edition, you will need to also run the following command after the one above has finished.


sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

2) Once this is done, you can either go here, and download the SDK, or to streamline the process, run in the terminal:

(Sorry, below is all one line)
wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.0_r1.zip

3) Once that has finished downloading, run the following command (or if you downloaded it straight from the SDK page, unzip the SDK where you saved it):

unzip android-sdk-linux_x86-1.0_r1.zip

4) Once that is done, you have successfully download the Android SDK.
To use the emulator, close the terminal window, open your File Manager, and go to your home folder, and navigate into 'android-sdk-linux_x86-1.0_r1'. Once in there, navigate to the tools directory and double click on the file 'emulator'

5) Once you have done that, the emulator will start, as this is the first time you have run it, it will ask if you want to submit statistical information to Google. Select the option you want (yes or no) and then the main emulator shall appear.

6) Once everything has appeared, a phone will come up, with the word 'ANDROID' on it, the emulator is now loading up, it may take a while, but once it is done, you should have a window like to the right.

7) You're finished! Do yourself a treat and have a mess around with it!

:-)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I literally did this yesterday and would have found this guide handy then. To those of you who haven't set seen the Android OS I recommend giving the emulator a look.

Drew Merryman said...

Ok. You totally rock. I looked all over the Android website, and a ton of other sources, and I couldn't find this! Thanks so much for posting step by step instructions for those of us new to Linux and its methods of doing things. It is an enormous help.

Unknown said...

I had problems finding how to start the emulator so here is how I did it:

android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r1/tools$ ./android create avd --name my_avd_name --target 1

android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r1/tools$ ./emulator @my_avd_name -scale 0.9

Anonymous said...

thanks calle for spelling that out. I was clueless and couldn't find a solution anywhere.

Gonkerd said...

Hi worked great. I had to start the emulator from commandline though.
I needed to add a datadir so I did.
used -datadir option

Unknown said...

ddms doesn't seem to work for me on ubuntu 64 bit. Any ideas? (And I do have ia32-libs installed).