Failed to get the adb version: Cannot run program "/home/johan/devtools/android/

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Getting Android SDK working on Ubuntu 64

October 21st, 2009 by Johan Haleby — Android
Johan Haleby

Today I was trying to setup the Android SDK (version 1.6_r1) on the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). After having installed the ADT Eclipse plugin and pointed out the Android SDK directory in the settings I immediately ran into the following error:

Failed to get the adb version: Cannot run program "/home/johan/devtools/android/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/tools/adb": java.io.IOException: error=2, No such file or directory

I opened the terminal and tried to manually run an Android executable but even here it said that the file couldn't be found! The problem seemed to be that the Android executables requires 32 bit libraries that are not available in Ubuntu 64 by default. To solve this I downloaded the execellent getlibs application which is a utility for automatically resolving dependencies for 32-bit programs on a 64 bit system. So I went into platforms/android-1.6/tools in the Android SDK installation folder and executed:


getlibs aapt


which installed and upgraded the following libraries:


The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ia32-libs lib32asound2 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1
  libc6-i386
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libc6 libc6-dev


After this was done I went back into Eclipse, did a project clean and refresh and after that I was able to start the Android emulator successfully. Hopefully this may help someone who's in the same situation.