2014/04/02: Getting the ADT to run on 64 bit Linux

Installation is mostly straight forward except that for some unexplicable reasons, somebody at Google thought that there is no need to compile the platform tools as 64 bit binaries. Hence, this article mostly serves me to recall which 32 bit libraries to install as soon as this changes. Hopefully soon but I am not counting on it.

Keywords: Linux, Ubuntu, Android, development

Installation

Installation of the Android SDK is fairly easy but there are a few things to do.

  1. Download the Android Developer Tools and unzip.
  2. Download and install a Java Runtime Environment. Possibly, you may want to download and install a JDK instead or as well.
  3. Create a link pointing from adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-$version/sdk/platform-tools to your jre directory.

Depending on your Ubuntu version, install the following 32 bit libraries. These libraries are needed for the SDK tools.

Ubuntu 12.04
$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
Ubuntu 13.04
$ sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 lib32stdc++6 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5
Ubuntu 13.10
$ sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 lib32stdc++6 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32z1 lib32tinfo5
Yes, lib32tinfo5 does not have to be explicitly specified, it will be pulled in as a dependency.

Finally, if you are using Java 8.0, you may want to remove the -XX:MaxPermSize=... options from adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-$version/eclipse/eclipse.ini which have been removed and generate a warning. In my version of the ADT, this option was included twice. The same applies to the --launcher.XXMaxPermSize 256m option which is split over two lines.

Subversion

ADT is based on Eclipse is nice. Eclipse is nice but it is nicer with Subversion integration provided by Subversive.

Subversive Update Site: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/1.1/update-site/

Thomas Gschwind