As with many people I’m using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 12.10. This means that when you install the various pieces you need for android development the tools found in the platform-tools directory won’t run. They give the simple error message

bash: android-sdk/platform-tools/adb: No such file or directory

The solution is simple enough, but it took me a few minutes to find, so maybe this post will save someone else that time.

The issue was that the apps are 32-bit and my install is 64-bit, so you need to install the 32-bit versions of the system libraries to make them happy.

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Et voila! The apps now run.

I’d suggest doing this before installing the eclipse ADT as it will check whether the apps can be run and if they can’t will produce some very strange and unhelpful errors when you try and look at an android project.

I did find a web page describing installing the apps via a ppa which claimed to avoid the need for the 32-bit libs, but when I tried it I couldn’t find any way of telling eclipse where to find the apps installed via the ppa and so was no further forward. If anyone knows the magic incantations to make this work then let me know as I’d prefer not to need the 32-bit libs.

Additionally, when trying to run the emulator I saw the following errors

[2013-01-06 17:58:48 - Emulator] Failed to load libGL.so<br></br>
[2013-01-06 17:58:48 - Emulator] error libGL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory<br></br>
[2013-01-06 17:58:48 - Emulator] Failed to load libGL.so<br></br>
[2013-01-06 17:58:48 - Emulator] error libGL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory```

The solution was provided by [this blog post](http://learnedstuffs.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/fixing-ubuntu-error-failed-to-load-libgl-so/).