Setting Up a Development Environment

Host System Setup

Introduction

This section provides instructions on how to configure your host system to build Android for mobile devices. While Android is designed as host-environment agnostic, it has been tested and is known to work on the following Linux operating system; Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper), 7.10 (Gutsy), and 8.04. Cygwin is not recommended.

Installing Packages

Required Packages

Android requires the following system packages:

• flex: This lexical analyzer generator is used to read a given input file for a description of a scanner to generate.
• bison: This is a general-purpose parser generator.
• gperf: This is a perfect hash function generator.
• libesd0-dev: This enlightened sound daemon (dev files) is used to mix digitized audio streams for playback by a single device.
• libwxgtk2.6-dev: This package provides GUI components and other facilities for many different platforms.
• build-essential: This package contains a list of packages considered fundamental to building Debian packages.

Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper)

On a clean Dapper system, type the following:

% sudo apt-get install flex bison gperf libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev zlib1g-dev
build-essential

This snippet includes an artificial line break to maintain a print-friendly document.

Ubuntu 7.10

1. The libwxgtk2.6-dev package will only work if the following code is included in your /etc/apt/source file.

   ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
   ## team, and may not be under a free license. Please satisfy yourself as to
   ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
   ## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
   ## team.
   # Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
   deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy universe
   # Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
   deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy universe
   # Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
   deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates universe
   # Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
   deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates universe
   

2. Install required packages with the following command:

   % sudo apt-get install flex bison gperf libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev zlib1g-dev
   build-essential
   

   This snippet includes an artificial line break to maintain a print-friendly document.

3. Install the X11 development environment with the following commands:

   % sudo apt-get install x-dev
   % sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
   % sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
   

Ubuntu 8.04

On a clean system, type the following:

% sudo apt-get install flex bison gperf libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev
zlib1g-dev build-essential
% sudo apt-get install x-dev
% sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
% sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
% sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk

Installing Java

Android source code includes a hard dependency on the Java Developer Kit (JDK) 5.0 Update 12 or greater. The specific file name of the Update 12 package is jdk-1_5_0_12-linux-i586.bin. To download this version of the Java JDK:

1. Navigate to: http://java.sun.com/products/archive/.
2. Select '5.0 Update 12' from the 'Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE)' -> 'JDK/JRE - 5.0' field and click 'Go.'
3. Click 'Download JDK.'
4. In the 'Linux Platform' section, click 'Linux self-extracting file' associated with the jdk-1_5_0_12-linux-i586.bin package.
5. Follow the installation instructions.

Once you have cleanly installed the JDK, modify your PATH environment variable to include /jdk1.5.0_12/bin at its beginning so that Dapper will use the correct installation.

Ubuntu 7.10

An alternative method to quickly install Java is to enable multiverse repo in /etc/apt/sources.list and then execute:

% sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk