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Building Android 4.0 on Ubuntu 11.10

By Alan on November 20, 2011

The source code for Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” was released last week, and Google’s build instructions list Ubuntu 10.04 as the only officially “supported” configuration for building AOSP on Linux. As of this writing Ubuntu 10.04 is a year and a half old, so lots of people have moved on to newer versions, some of which cause problems due to missing/renamed packages, conflicting versions, etc.

Ubuntu 11.10 in particular is troublesome because it uses gcc-4.6 by default and has no sun-java6-jdk in its repositories. Here’s what you’ll need to do to get AOSP 4.0.x to compile on Ubuntu 11.10.

Install dependencies

Compilers, parsers, file-manipulation tools, libraries, etc; this is mandatory! The list on the source.android.com Inititalizing a Build Environment page is similar, but a few of those packages don’t exist in 11.10. Use these:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf build-essential zip curl zlib1g-dev libc6-dev lib32ncurses5-dev ia32-libs \
x11proto-core-dev libx11-dev lib32z1-dev libgl1-mesa-dev g++-multilib mingw32 tofrodos python-markdown libxml2-utils

Install an “old” GCC

In addition to building applications for the phone, Android’s build system builds a few tools for the host operating system (such as the tools in the SDK). The initial release of the Ice Cream Sandwich source code has a few incompatibilities with the version of the GNU C compiler which comes with Ubuntu 11.10 (GCC 4.6). Install GCC 4.4 from Ubuntu’s repositories:

sudo apt-get install gcc-4.4 g++-4.4 g++-4.4-multilib gcc-4.4-multilib

Small fix for libX11, which some statically-linked programs might need:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so

Download Sun Java 6 JDK

Android 2.3+ requires Java 6 to build correctly. While OpenJDK did work for 2.3, it doesn’t work for Android 4.0; you need Sun Java. Download the JDK 1.6 binary release from Sun’s Java download site and unzip it somewhere in your system, for example:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/java/64/
sudo cp jdk-6u29-linux-x64.bin /opt/java/64
sudo su -
cd /opt/java/64
chmod +x jdk-6u29-linux-x64.bin
./jdk-6u29-linux-x64.bin
exit

Add the new Java to your shell environment’s $PATH so it takes precedent over other Javas you might have installed:

echo 'export PATH=/opt/java/64/jdk1.6.0_29/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc

Relaunch your terminal and test, java -version:

java version "1.6.0_29"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_29-b11)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.4-b02, mixed mode)

Building…

Follow Google’s Downloading the Source Tree, which will help you install the repo tool and clone the android-4.0.1_r1 branch. It’s damn near 9 gigabytes, so make sure you have a fast Internet pipe and a pot of coffee ready.

After that you’ll be ready to build:

cd ~/android/ics
lunch full-eng
make CC=gcc-4.4 CXX=g++-4.4 -j4

On my dual-core Core i7 Thinkpad T420 with 8GB of RAM this takes ~110 minutes, your mileage may vary depending on the number of available cores, amount of RAM, and speed of your hard drives.

If your build completes successfully you’ll be able to test it immediately using the emulator command (a version of QEMU, built as part of the build process):

Fork me on GitHub

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Posted in , | Tagged , , , | 33 Responses

33 responses to “Building Android 4.0 on Ubuntu 11.10”

  1. Ben
    Ben November 21, 2011 at 16:00 | | Reply

    Excellent tutorial, thanks for posting. Any chance you will follow up with how to set up the vendor files for non-dev phones?

    1. Alan
      Alan November 22, 2011 at 16:53 | | Reply

      I am trying to finish up another Android port already (but on CyanogenMod). Once I get that port more stable I’ll start looking into setting up new devices on AOSP. I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S, which should run Ice Cream Sandwich pretty well. There’s already an initial port for it, but I might look into helping them (if I have anything to offer, hah).

      If you’re interested, I did learn a bit about vendorsetup scripts and lunch combos, and I wrote about that here: http://mjanja.co.ke/2011/09/building-cyanogenmod-7-for-the-huawei-u8150/

      1. Salim Ibrahim
        Salim Ibrahim December 12, 2011 at 02:22 | | Reply

        I just successfully compiled and run the emulator. Now I am trying to port this to a device. Is there an AOSP port guide available or the CM will work. I am looking to port AOSP to the Nexus S and the Samsung Galaxy S 4G devices. I would like to learn from AOSP before using CyanogenMod.

  2. Jaspal Sanddhu
    Jaspal Sanddhu November 23, 2011 at 23:17 | | Reply

    While building ICS4 on Ubuntu 11.10 on 32 bit JDK, I get the following error while compiling..

    chost Executable: bb_dump (out/host/linux-x86/obj/EXECUTABLES/bb_dump_intermediates/bb_dump)
    /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses
    collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
    make: *** [out/host/linux-x86/obj/EXECUTABLES/adb_intermediates/adb] Error 1
    make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs….

    1. Alan
      Alan November 25, 2011 at 21:06 | | Reply

      Looks like you need the ncurses libraries installed on your system. Are you sure you installed all the relevant package dependencies? Also, I think 32 bit isn’t fully supported by Google… so it might not even work!

      1. EwanG
        EwanG December 29, 2011 at 08:02 | | Reply

        So are you saying I need to be running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu to build ICS? If so, any known issues doing that within VirtualBox as long as the host system is 64-bit? Thanks!

        1. Alan
          Alan December 29, 2011 at 10:15 | | Reply

          I haven’t tried on 32 bit, and sure enough, Google’s official documentation says 32 bit support is “experimental”, http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html. If your VirtualBox host is 64 bit, then you should really be creating 64-bit guests as well… there’s no reason not to. :)

  3. Stéphane Guérin
    Stéphane Guérin November 28, 2011 at 19:24 | | Reply

    Thank you for this very helpful article!
    FYI, to make it compile without error I also needed to do:
    sudo apt-get install g++-4.4-multilib gcc-4.4-multilib

    1. Alan
      Alan November 29, 2011 at 08:45 | | Reply

      Ah, thanks. I might have already had those installed, so I didn’t notice they were required. I’ll add them to the list. Cheers!

  4. Mathieu
    Mathieu December 2, 2011 at 23:39 | | Reply

    After following your guide, I’ve this error :
    build/core/base_rules.mk:166: *** abi/cpp: MODULE.TARGET.SHARED_LIBRARIES.libgabi++ already defined by Custom_android/abi/cpp. Arrêt.

    Do you know how to fix it ?

    I’m on kubuntu 11.10

    1. Alan
      Alan December 4, 2011 at 20:52 | | Reply

      Nope, not sure. Never seen that. Are you sure you’re using the proper GCC? make CC=gcc-4.4 CXX=g++-4.4?

  5. e8hffff
    e8hffff December 4, 2011 at 19:05 | | Reply

    Java install is not easy as versions are changed to release 7u1

    1. Alan
      Alan December 4, 2011 at 20:48 | | Reply

      I’m not sure what you mean. Did you have problems installing Java 1.6? Java 7 isn’t supported for compiling AOSP…

      1. e8hffff
        e8hffff December 5, 2011 at 11:35 | | Reply

        When I went to Oracle website the latest version 7u1 was pushed for download. I installed that and when I pulled the android source down it wouldn’t’ compile due to it not being compatible with new Java. I tried to force the compile by getting the code to jump over the version check but it still faltered.

        I read after some research that the Android code is not suited for 7u1 yet but will soon be, so I’ve decided to leave it till then.

        1. Salim Ibrahim
          Salim Ibrahim December 11, 2011 at 19:47 | | Reply

          The instructions on downloading the Java 6 JDK did not work for me on 11.10 64 bit. It did not appear to be in the path. I tested this by running:

          java -version

          I used these commands instead and that appears to have worked:

          sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin
          1. Salim Ibrahim
            Salim Ibrahim December 11, 2011 at 19:50 |

            Other than that, great tutorial. I am building at the moment.

            I initially started building in Mac OS X Lion but after several issues with Lion, I decided to use Linux via VMWare Fusion instead.

            Thanks for your tutorial Alan!

          2. Alan
            Alan December 11, 2011 at 20:55 |

            Glad you figured it out. The PPA is definitely much easier for installing Java, I just wanted to do it the “hard” way. ;) I’m sure someone will find that useful, though.

  6. e8hffff
    e8hffff December 4, 2011 at 20:02 | | Reply

    I’ve given up as I don’t want to downgrade JAVA. It’s pretty slack that Google can’t keep upto date for their code to suit the base engine.

    1. Alan
      Alan December 4, 2011 at 20:50 | | Reply

      You don’t have to downgrade Java… just install it along side your other one. You can use both, just make sure to set the PATH to include the Java 1.6 before you mess with AOSP. :)

      1. e8hffff
        e8hffff December 5, 2011 at 11:36 | | Reply

        Oh ok, have 6 as a slave install. May try soon.

      2. e8hffff
        e8hffff December 5, 2011 at 11:40 | | Reply

        Another point is I only installed Java as the one I original started with on my system was Ubuntu repository version, which also wasn’t compatible with the Android build. I need to get some in between version that would have required digging into legacy releases at oracle. Mind you I didn’t know this till the latest failing.

  7. joe ferreira
    joe ferreira December 27, 2011 at 21:36 | | Reply

    for this line if I wanted to make a otapackage

    make CC=gcc-4.4 CXX=g++-4.4 -j4

    would I change it to this?

    make otapackage CC=gcc-4.4 CXX=g++-4.4 -j4
    1. Alan
      Alan December 28, 2011 at 16:18 | | Reply

      Yeah, that should work. :)

      1. joe ferreira
        joe ferreira December 28, 2011 at 21:06 | | Reply

        ok another noob question.
        if I had a recovery.img from say cwm can I have this pre-built recovery.img added to my otapackage during the build instead of adding the default android recovery?

        I know that one could mount the image and replace the android recovery image every time a build is completed but I was hoping for a more native way.

        1. Alan
          Alan December 28, 2011 at 21:51 | | Reply

          I think you could probably just replace the boot or recovery images in out/target/product/.. before you make otapackage. I do it with CyanogenMod sometimes, but never tried in AOSP.

          1. joe ferreira
            joe ferreira December 29, 2011 at 19:26 |

            Thank you.

          2. joe ferreira
            joe ferreira December 31, 2011 at 00:24 |

            I am actually using this guide with the cyanogenmod ics branch for my wingray xoom. so far so good. I have compiled a working version using this guide and the binaries from google. http://code.google.com/android/nexus/drivers.html#wingray

            After I determined that they removed get-rommanager.sh from the ics branch and I manually downloaded the script from https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_vendor_cyanogen/blob/gingerbread/get-rommanager it worked great.

            I am using this guide and Building CyanogenMod 7 for the Huawei U8150 http://mjanja.co.ke/2011/09/building-cyanogenmod-7-for-the-huawei-u8150/

            I just did a repo sync for cyanogenmod ics branch and someone else already did the work I wanted to do for the wingray xoom and pushed it through the cyanogenmod github.

            :) I guess all I have to do now is recompile.

            Thanks again!

  8. EwanG
    EwanG December 30, 2011 at 19:21 | | Reply

    OK, now that I have finally completed the exercise, a few suggestions for your consideration:

    1) I would emphasize the need to install Ubuntu 64-bit at the start. The Ubuntu download page and many of the online guides recommend using the 32-bit version for compatibility, and so I got a fair bit into this before seeing the need to be 64-bit.

    2) A couple things were “off” on the Java instructions. First of all, if you follow your link, it takes you to the 7 branch. So you might want to point out to folks that they can click on the box on the right for “Previous Versions”, and then get the 1.6.9 029 version that both Android and your instructions prefer. Second, the given statement to add to the .profile doesn’t create a working PATH fix (at least for my setup of 11.10). I had to edit the .profile instead to add a line:
    PATH=”/opt/java/64/jdk1.6.0_29/bin:$PATH”

    3) Once you’ve completed the build instructions, you should point out the need to run that “. build/envsetup.sh” first. Then both you and the Google site use the lunch tool for the example. However lunch is not installed by default. Fortunately Ubuntu gives you the apt-get line for lunch-python, but it might be helpful to add it.

    FWIW, after all this I did get a successful build of ICS to run in my emulator. Now to start working to customize for my 7 inch tablet :-)

    1. Alan
      Alan December 30, 2011 at 22:42 | | Reply

      Congrats! Thanks for the feedback. You’re absolutely right, I missed the . build/envsetup.sh step, I’ll add it right now.

      Regarding the lunch command, it’s actually a shell function which gets created by the build setup script. If you’re curious, explore the output of type -a lunch. That python-lunch package you mentioned is something unrelated.

      Regarding the PATH “fix” for Java, I’m not sure what went wrong for you. Make sure your ~/.profile actually has the modified PATH in it, and is exported at the end of the profile before it gets overwritten.

      Regarding Java 1.6… I mentioned several times that you needed 1.6, but maybe I should include a note that I really mean it; 1.7 won’t work!

  9. ventanas
    ventanas January 16, 2012 at 00:50 | | Reply

    excellent tips!
    thank you very much for these instructions on ubuntu 11.

    :)
    ventanas

  10. ventanas
    ventanas January 16, 2012 at 20:46 | | Reply

    Hi,

    are you able to get apt-get working fine under ubuntu 11.10 behind a proxy with NTLM authentication?

    I’ve been spending two days trying to get it working but nothing seems to work.

    I have proxy_ip, proxy_port, proxy_user_name and proxy_password to setup, I have tried putting them all in the /etc/bash.bashrc file using the HTTP_PROXY environment variable, but it doesn’t work.

    any suggestion?

    :)
    M

  11. chethan678
    chethan678 January 21, 2012 at 00:47 | | Reply

    Hi, i am trying to download the source code for ICS but when i try to init my repo gives error…

    repo init -u git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android.git -b ics
    fatal: Cannot get https://android.googlesource.com/tools/repo/clone.bundle
    fatal: error unknown url type: https
    user@localhost:~/Android/ics$

    someone please help me…i am trying hard reading every q&a but couldn’t get it through…

    1. Alan
      Alan January 21, 2012 at 12:25 | | Reply

      You’re trying to checkout CyanogenMod, not Google’s ICS (a small difference, but worth noting). Regarding the https error, which version of git are you using? What about repo? Maybe try updating to the latest repo (from Google’s AOSP build instructions):

      curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

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