How to make Android's aapt and adb work on 64-bit Ubuntu without ia32-libs (works for versions 12, 13 and 14)

Since Ubuntu 13.10 no longer has ia32-libs I cannot get my android development environment running on a clean install of 13.10.

The error is ~/android-studio/sdk/build-tools/android-4.2.2/aapt": error=2, No such file or directory

This file does exist and is executable but it is a 32bit executable.

In previous installs I just installed ia32-libs to fix this but this solution no longer works for Ubuntu 13.10.

I have tried solutions proposed by askubuntu questions eg. this one https://askubuntu.com/questions/107230/what-happened-to-the-ia32-libs-package

but it isn't working for me. From that askubuntu.com answer I see I should install separate packages with

sudo apt-get install package:i386 

but I don't know which packages to install to make the android tools work again.

Has anyone else solved this problem and or does anyone have a list of packages which need to be installed for the android tools?


Another way(without adding i386 architecture)...

sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 lib32stdc++6 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5
sudo apt-get install lib32z1

Ref: Fix Android adb on Ubuntu 13.10 64bit


While dpkg --add-architecture i386 command is not needed in the current version of Ubuntu (13.10), it is required in the current Debian versions (7.x) and it will be required in the future Ubuntu versions as well. So I am going to leave it in. Just ignore it for Ubuntu 13.10.

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

Update: aapt indeed requires zlib so I added it to the list. But you should not be needing any lib32 packages.


It's just a matter giving sdk files the necessary permissions.

 sudo chmod -R +x /path/to/android-sdk-linux

Restart Android Studio and see if that fix it.

Permission issues typically occur when you copy/move sdk files from a NTFS partition or copying from another computer.


On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x64 and buildToolsVersion 21/22 it was enough to execute the following:

sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libstdc++6:i386
sudo apt-get install zlib1g:i386

The error I was getting:

Execution failed for task ':core:processReleaseResources'.
> A problem occurred starting process 'command '/home/user/androidSDK/android-sdk/build-tools/21.1.2/aapt''