To set up an existing install of Eclipse to do some Android development do the following:
- Go to http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html and look for and download the ADT bundle for your OS (in my case I was using Fedora Core 18 at the time)
- Unpack it as the user that is going to be running Eclipse and/or after you unpack it make sure that your user has read/write/execute permissons for the files in this directory (obviously, you don’t need execute permssion for non executables). To make things easy, I just created an ~/sdks directory and unpacked it in there.
- Fire up eclipse and go to Help/New Software.
- Add the following repository: https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/
- Check off both the Developer Tools and NDK Plugins.
- After those plugins install go to Window/Preferences/Android, and click the ‘Browse’ button next to ‘SDK Location:’, selecting the /path-to/adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-20130917/sdk. When setting this up you might get a dialogue box that indicates that the version of the Android SDK Tools and/or Android SDK Platform Tools is not compatible with the version of the adt-bundle you are attempting to use. In my case, I was prompted to update it via the Android SDK Manager and was able to download an updated version.
If you have an existing project that you are working with you might have to update the project.properties to update the sdk level number.
You might see an error like:
Unable to resolve target ‘android-17’ until the SDK is loaded
If so, update the ‘target=android-17’ property in the project.properties file to match the value of ‘Platform.MinPlatformToolsRev’ in the /path-to/adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-20130917/sdk/tools/source.properties file.
In my case, I updated the project.properties to:
# Project target.
target=android-18
Getting the value ’18’ from the source.properties:
Platform.MinPlatformToolsRev=18