Trouble getting Android emulator to run in eclipse

Question

I'm trying to run the SDK Samples on the Emulator in Eclipse 3.5.

Most of the time the AVD Manager hangs when I try to create a new AVD. When I manage to create an AVD and try to start the emulator I get this:

emulator: ERROR: no search paths found in this AVD's configuration

weird, the AVD's config.ini file is malformed. Try re-creating it.

I'm running the latest version of the SDK on Win7 32 bit. Any ideas?

Update:

I think I found the source of the problem. I'm running a Hebrew version of WIN 7. My user name is in Hebrew. Apparently this causes a problem for Eclipse. Once I started to suspect that was the problem, I created a new user on the system called DEV and tried to run the emulator under that user. Went like butter.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem because of non-latin letters in my username. When opening the ini-file in a text editor I found the non-latin characters was wrong. So I just changed the path from path=c:\Users\YourNa¤%"%¤%%¤me.android\avd\YourAVDName.avd to path=c:\Users\YourName.android\avd\YourAVDName.avd and it worked.

Answer 2

If you have installed the Android SDK to a different drive ie not C: then you might need to set the ANDROID_HOME environment variable to the location of the SDK installation

Answer 3

To make sure everything is installed correctly, I recommend you reinstall all the components. To be sure everything goes correctly follow my step by step instructions on my blog.

http://androidcodemonkey.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-setup-android-development_23.html

If you follow all the steps you should be good to go!

Good luck.

Answer 4

Another rather simple solution to this problem (non-english characters in the AVD's path), is to use the "shortname" of the directories. In my case:

My windows user is "András", so my homedir is C:\Users\András

If you open up a cmd, cd to C:\Users, and issue a "dir /x" command, you will see the "shortnames" of the directories, in my case it is "ANDRS~1".

So you just change the path in the AVD's config file from C:\Users\András\blabla to C:\Users\ANDRS~1\blabla, and voila, it works.

Answer 5

You can set the environment variable ANDROID_SDK_HOME. For example:

ANDROID_SDK_HOME=D:\Development\android-sdk\

It helped me. Add this variable to <eclipseFolder>\configuration\.settings\org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs:

ANDROID_SDK_HOME=D\:\\Development\\android-sdk\\

Stop the process adb.exe and (re)start Eclipse.

Answer 6

One way is to don't exit the emulator after running. You edit the program without closing emulator. Do it every time.