Setting up the Android SDK and writing your first test application is a painless experience for the most part. My installation on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala went fairly well with only a couple hangups which I will cover here.
First things first, if you haven’t already installed the eclipse IDE and plan to use it for your development work, do so now.
$ sudo apt-get install eclipse
Now you can go here to download the Android SDK and begin with the quick start guide. http://developer.android.com/sdk
Once you extracted the SDK tarball, make it easier on yourself and add the SDK installation to your path. Doing this will make it easier to access and execute the Android SDK binaries. For example if you extracted the SDK tarball inside your home directory you would add the following line to the top of your .bashrc file also located in your home directory.
PATH=$PATH:/home/ryan/android-sdk-linux_86/tools
The next problem I encountered was when I tried to install the Android Developer Tools plugin for eclipse. After adding the remote site and attempting to install the Android plugin I would get the following error message.
Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found. Software being installed: Android Development Tools 0.9.4.v200910220141-17704 (com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.feature.group 0.9.4.v200910220141-17704) Missing requirement: Android Development Tools 0.9.4.v200910220141-17704 (com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.feature.group 0.9.4.v200910220141-17704) requires 'org.eclipse.gef 0.0.0' but it could not be found
The problem occurs because org.eclipse.emf is not installed by default. To fix this you must add http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo to your update sites. To do this you can use the same screen that you used to add the Android remote site which you can access here.
Help -> Install New Software
From this point forward you should be able to finish the quick start guide.
