This blog gives pointers on getting the Android development environment working on a base Ubuntu 8.10 installation.

This assumes you're familiar with google's installation instructions (see http://code.google.com/android/intro/installing.html) and might still be having some problems.

This also assumes you've installed Sun JDK 1.6.

So here are some tips and gotcha's:

• Don't install Eclipse with Ubuntu's package manager. At time of writing, Eclipse 3.2.2.2 is in the distro. Make you sure have the latest Eclipse version by downloading directly from Eclipse's site. See http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
• With most (if not all) base Ubuntu installations, java-6-openjdk or java-gcj is used, not Sun's JDK. You don't want to uninstall java-6-openjdk either because other apps in your system will be uninstalled along with it. In your Ubuntu filesystem, JVM tools (e.g. javac, javah, javadoc, java) are actually symlinks to the actual JDK. So what you want to do is update these symbolic links. There are at least 2 tools I've come across to help do this. I found the following:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

sudo galternatives

• In Eclipse, for some reason I've not been able to add the ADT plugin via add site.  I had to download the SDK zip file and install as a local archive.
• If you don't know where to install Eclipse, check out my post on where to install eclipse since we're not using the comfy package manager to take care of things for us.

That's it for now.