Thursday, February 9, 2012

Installing the Android SDK on Ubuntu 11.10

My harddrive failed, forcing me to reinstall my OS. I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10, so this is basically a rehash of my previous instructions for Ubuntu 11.04.

Make sure that you have the 32bit compatibility libraries installed if you are using 64bit Ubuntu

If you fail to install the 32bit compatibility libraries you will get an 'adb version' error at the end when you run Eclipse. If you are running 64bit Ubuntu, start out by installing the 32bit libraries

~$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Install the JDK

This should be a straight forward step

~$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Download and install Eclipse

Find and download an appropriate version of Eclipse. Since my last instructions for 11.04, the version of Eclipse in the Ubuntu repositories has jumped to 3.7. Hooray! Go ahead and install Eclipse

~$ sudo apt-get install eclipse

Download and install the Android SDK

Following the instructions here, which include a download link, install the SDK. You can download it with this command

~$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r16-linux.tgz

Next, untar the package

~$ tar -xvzf android-sdk_r16-linux.tgz

You will need to remember where these files ended up when you install the ADT plugin for Eclipse. If you followed these instructions, you should have extracted the files to ./android-sdk-linux/

Install the ADT Plugin in Eclipse

The next next step historically posed me the most problems. This time proved no different. Rather than plagiarize the steps, just look here for the instructions. To summarize the steps, you must open Eclipse, add the ADT plugin location, and install the ADT plugin within Eclipse. Once installed, you must point Eclipse to the location of the Android SDK folder, previously installed.

If you get the following error during the install

Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
  Software being installed: Android Development Tools 16.0.1.v201112150204-238534 (com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.feature.group 16.0.1.v201112150204-238534)
  Missing requirement: Android Development Tools 16.0.1.v201112150204-238534 (com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.feature.group 16.0.1.v201112150204-238534) requires 'org.eclipse.wst.sse.core 0.0.0' but it could not be found

~$ sudo eclipse

and try again. This did the trick for me. It seems to be a problem on 64 bit Ubuntu with Eclipse v3.7

Install Additional Android Developer Components

Now, in a terminal, and go to the android-sdk-linux_x86/tools/ directory and run the Android program to open the Android SDK and AVD manager.

~$ cd ~/android-sdk-linux/tools/
~/android-sdk-linux/tools$ ./android

You should get a window like this

Select 'Available packages' on the left. Next, select the components that you want. Google provided a list of suggested components here. Once you have selected the packages that you want, click the 'Install selected' button on the bottom right. Depending on what you select, it may need to download several hundred mb. This can take awhile. You can find more information on using the SDK and AVD manager here.

Setting up your PATH variable (Optional)

In Ubuntu, you want to open your .bashrc file. A simple

~$ gedit ~/.bashrc

will open the file. Next, add the following line to the end of .bashrc

export PATH=${PATH}:(path-to-sdk)/android-sdk-linux/tools:(path-to-sdk)/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools

replacing (path-to-sdk) with the path to where you installed the sdk. If you followed this tutorial, it will probably be in your home directory.

Creating an AVD

If you've made it this far, before you dive into your 'Hello World' application, you need to create an AVD, or Android Virtual Device.

First, if you haven't already installed a platform in Step 5. Once you have a platform installed, follow the instructions here

Start Programming!

If all went well, you are ready to start developing an app for Android!

Some Notes

The official Android SDK instructions say you might have to fiddle with the USB settings to get your physical hardware to play nicely with the debugger. All I had to do was to enable USB Debugging under application settings on the Android device and I was on my way. That was a nice surprise.

This time around, installing the SDK went smoothly. I think the SDK and Ubuntu showed some maturity in the ease of installing the SDK. Last year I had to fight a little with things just to get anything to work.