Android Development Environment

VAR-SOM-MX6 - Android Nougat N7.1.1 - Creating an Android Development Environment

Host PC requirements

The host development environment for Android is based on Ubuntu and Debian, please install one of the following

• Ubuntu version 14.04/16.04 64bit LTS
  • Ubuntu LTS 14.04 64 bit - Download it from : http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-14.04.6-desktop-amd64.iso
  • Ubunut LTS 16.04 64 bit - Download it from : http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04/ubuntu-16.04.6-desktop-amd64.iso
• Debian 8.4 64bit https://www.debian.org/releases

We recommend to have physical build machine with at least below Hardware Configuration:

• CPU : Intel / AMD Quad Core or higher CPU cores with base frequency 2.3 Ghz or higher.
• RAM : you need at least 16GB of RAM
• SSD (Recommended) : 450 GB OR HDD : 500 GB Free space
• Internet Connectivity

Note: The build process requires about 135GB of free space. Before any build, make sure you have adequate free space available on HDD / SDD before starting any build.

Note: Do not use other Ubuntu or Debian releases, than the ones recommended above.

Note: If you plan to use Virtual machines, make sure you have given at least 16 GB RAM allocated to the Linux Virtual Machine.

Otherwise your build may fail, as Android build requires quite significant resources specialy during linking stage the RAM usage minimumm 16 GB RAM is required.

You could use USB pendrive to boot and install if you wish to,

• Windows : https://rufus.ie/ and give above ISO as source, and follow https://rufus.ie/ guide
• Linux Machine: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

Follow your Linux Distro specific wizards to install build OS.

Install required packages on host PC

Before you begin, make sure you installed correct version of build OS on your build machine. You can verify by using below commands

$  uname -a | grep "x86_64"

You should get output like below

Linux user-desktop 4.15.0-72-generic #81~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 26 16:34:21 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Notice the "x86_64" string, if you have installed other (32 bit version) such OS flavor for Android build is not supported currently.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install gnupg flex bison gperf build-essential zip gcc-multilib g++-multilib 
$ sudo apt-get -y install libc6-dev-i386 lib32ncurses5-dev x11proto-core-dev libx11-dev lib32z-dev
$ sudo apt-get -y install ccache libgl1-mesa-dev libxml2-utils xsltproc unzip bc
$ sudo apt-get -y install uuid uuid-dev zlib1g-dev liblz-dev liblzo2-2 liblzo2-dev lzop git curl
$ sudo apt-get -y install u-boot-tools mtd-utils android-tools-fsutils device-tree-compiler gdisk m4 libz-dev

Install the OpenJDK

Android Nougat requires OpenJDK 8.

To install it:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk

If your Ubuntu version is missing the package (which shouldn't happen), add the PPA repository and run the previous commands again:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa

Update the default Java version by running:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
$ sudo update-alternatives --config javac