Installing Google Android SDK 1.0 On Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

This guide explains how you can install the Google Android SDK 1.0 on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. With this stable release of the Android SDK, you can now develop applications for Android smartphones (like T-Mobile's G1) and offer them on the Android Market.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I'm using the user name falko with the home directory /home/falko in this tutorial. Replace them with your own details where appropriate.

2 Installing Java And Eclipse

Before we can install the Android SDK, we must install Java and Eclipse (version 3.3 or 3.4 - I'm using 3.4 codename "Ganymede" here).

First, we open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal):

To install Java, we type

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin

(If you are on a x86_64 system, you also must install ia32-libs:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

)

You will be asked to accept the Java license during the installation:

The Android SDK 1.0 requires Eclipse 3.3 or 3.4. Ufortunately, the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories only have a package for Eclipse 3.2 - therefore we must install Eclipse manually.

Open a browser and go to http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. Select one of the Java, Java EE, or RCP versions of Eclipse. I've chosen the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers for Linux 32bit (select Linux 64bit if you're on an x86_64 system):

Download the file to your hard drive, e.g. the desktop (/home/falko/Desktop):

To install Eclipse, we must open a terminal again. Go to the directory where you've saved the Eclipse file and uncompress it:

cd /home/falko/Desktop/
tar xvfz eclipse-jee-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz

This creates a directory called eclipse.

Afterwards, you can delete the Eclipse archive file:

rm -f eclipse-jee-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz

My eclipse directory is now located on my desktop (/home/falko/Desktop) - I don't want it there, so I move it to my home directory (you can leave it where it is or move it to whatever directory you prefer):

mv eclipse ~

Inside the eclipse directory, there is an executable called eclipse - that's the file we must run when we want to start Eclipse. Obviously, we don't want to do this from the command line, so we create a launcher for it.

Right-click on Applications and select Edit Menus:

Select Programming (or whatever category you want the launcher to be located in) and click on New Item:

Type in the name of the application (e.g. Eclipse) and the full path to the eclipse executable (/home/falko/eclipse/eclipse in my case) and click on OK:

Then leave the menu editor:

Now we can use the launcher to start Eclipse (Applications > Programming > Eclipse):

Eclipse is starting up...

... and asking for a workspace (you can accept the default one):

This is how Eclipse looks:

On to the Android SDK installation...