It was about time to install Android SDK on my ASROCK workstation powered by Ubuntu 10.04. Right know, I’m using Dalvik Debug Monitor from Android SDK to take screenshot from my HTC Hero, but on the long run I think I’ll need the SDK if I’ll ever want to write and run some python script on Android using excellent SL4A (Scripting Layer for Android).

PART 1 – enabling ddms

Make sure Java jdk is in the path (if you don’t have java on your machine, install it with sudo apt-get openjdk-6-jdk).
I used JDK that I installed for Oracle SQLDeveloper.

$ export PATH=/oracle/jdk1.6.0_21/bin:$PATH
$ mkdir android_sdk
$ cd android_sdk
$ pwd
/home/alesk/android_sdk

Download and install Android SDK:

$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r10-linux_x86.tgz
$ tar zxvf android-sdk_r10-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86/

If you wish to run ddms (Dalvik Debug monitor) you’ll have to install “Android SDK Platform-tools”.
Launch android GUI and install package:

$ cd tools
$ ./android 

Open Available packages and select “Android SDK Platform-tools, Revision 3”:

After installation completes, make sure that you run adb as root (by default adb starts as user).

$ cd /home/alesk/android_sdk/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools
$ ./adb kill-server
$ sudo ./adb start-server
[sudo] password for alesk: 
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *

Check if you can see your phone as a device.

$ ./adb devices
List of devices attached 
HT97RL904617	device

Now you can start ddms (Dalvik Debug Monitor).

$ cd /home/alesk/android_sdk/android-sdk-linux_x86/tools
$ ./ddms

PART 2 – Preparing Android Emulator

$ cd android_sdk/tools
$ ./android

As you can see, there are no Virtual Devices yet. Let’s create one, but before we start we need to download and install API’s for target device.
Select “Installed packages”, then button “Update all”. From the list I selected Accept All. Be patient, it’ll take quite some time for download to finish (it took approx. 2 hours on 1Mbps “broadband”).

After downloads complete we can start creating Virtual Android device that’ll serve as emulator.
Click button “New”, then fill necessary information about your target device. Since I own HTC Hero with Android OS 2.1 I created virtual devices as shown on the picture:

After you click on “Create AVD”, you’ll see newly created virtual device among Virtual devices section.

Now, we can start Virtual device by selecting device from the list and clicking on Start button, then on Launch button (leaving everything on the menu in default state).

It can take several minutes for Virtual Device to “boot”, in short, don’t expect from emulator the same speed as if you’re using “real” phone (on my ASROCK, with dual core Atom processor, it took approx. five minutes to boot the virtual phone device. In general, everything is extremely slow compared with a real Android phone!). Eventually, you should see android home screen similar to this one:

Use mouse to unlock your “phone”, by dragging lock to the right. Mouse click replaces a “tap” on real phone.

I tested my newly created virtual “HTC Hero” device by installing Python for Android and SL4A according to this article..

If you “tap” on SL4A you should see python demo scripts.

Let’s say that we wrote some python script (hello_dbaportal.py) that we want to upload to virtual device, it’s as easy as:

$ cd android_sdk/platform-tools
$ ./adb push hello_dbaportal.py /sdcard/sl4a/scripts 
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
1 KB/s (80 bytes in 0.077s)

If you check emulator, you’ll find python script hello_dbaportal.py, from where you can run the code…

or, if you’re keen to fiddle with the script inside emulator, you can also edit the script…