Setting up Android SDK on Linux

Google provides Windows, Linux and Mac OS X releases of Android SDK. Unfortunately the Linux build is a 32-bit application and setup on modern Linux desktops requires some tweaking. The following steps are needed:

• Download the SDK and extract to a directory of your choice.
• Create new environment variables named ANDROID_SDK and ANDROID_SDK15. Both should point to the SDK installation directory.
• Make sure that JAVA_HOME points to a 64-bit JDK.
• Add $ANDROID_SDK/tools to the PATH variable.
• Install 32-bit releases of the following libraries: libXt, libXtst, libXi and ncurses. Your package manager should allow 32-bit and 64-bit versions to co-exist on your system.
• Create an AVD (Android Virtual Device) instance, e.g. android create avd -n my_avd -t 1

You should now be able to launch the Android emulator with the following command (my_avd is name of the newly created Android Virtual Device):

emulator -avd my_avd