Android SDK having trouble with ADB

So, I installed the Android SDK, Eclipse, and the ADT. Upon firing up Eclipse the first time after setting up the ADT, this error popped up:

[2012-05-29 12:11:06 - adb] /home/drsmith/Downloads/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[2012-05-29 12:11:06 - adb] 'adb version' failed!
/home/drsmith/Downloads/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[2012-05-29 12:11:06 - adb] Failed to parse the output of 'adb version':
Standard Output was:

Error Output was:
/home/drsmith/Downloads/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[2012-05-29 12:11:06 - adb] /home/drsmith/Downloads/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[2012-05-29 12:11:06 - adb] 'adb version' failed!
/home/drsmith/Downloads/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[2012-05-29 12:11:06 - adb] Failed to parse the output of 'adb version':
Standard Output was:

Error Output was:
/home/drsmith/Downloads/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I'm not quite sure how this is. Feels weird that there's a missing library there. I'm using Ubuntu 12.04. No adb is a pretty big blow as an Android developer. How do I fix?

Solution 1:

You need library ncurses 32 bit version installed in your system

sudo apt-get install libncurses5:i386

In addition to libncurses5, you may require libstdc++6.

sudo apt-get install libstdc++6:i386

With the command

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

You install a lot of libraries that is not useful to solve your problem.

Solution 2:

Android SDK platform tools requires ia32-libs, which itself is a big package of libraries:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

UPDATE:

Below are the latest instructions from Google on how to install Android SDK library dependencies:

If you are running a 64-bit distribution on your development machine, you need to install additional packages first. For Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) and above, install the libncurses5:i386, libstdc++6:i386, and zlib1g:i386 packages using apt-get:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 zlib1g:i386

For earlier versions of Ubuntu, install the ia32-libs package using apt-get:

apt-get install ia32-libs