It turns out, the Android emulator goes out of its way to make this tricky. You need a handful of components to get the Android emulator running:
* The Platform Tools
* The version-specific SDK
* The ABI/system images
Two of these things are easily installed from the command line! One of them seems only accessible through the UI! (That last one, there)
But fortunately, if you happen to know the URL where the zip file containing the ABI is, you can download it, and unzip it to the right place!
Then, on first launch, you get a modal dialog asking whether you want to send usage statistics to Google. Useful. But annoying, when you're not a user using the tool!
So, here is my script to do all the magic you need to actually get your android emulator working (on Linux):
wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r15-linux.tgz tar xf android-sdk_r15-linux.tgz cd android-sdk-linux tools/android update sdk --no-ui -t android-14,platform-tools mkdir -p system-images/android-14 cd system-images/android-14 wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/sysimg_armv7a-14_r01.zip unzip sysimg_armv7a-14_r01.zip mkdir -p ~/.android echo "pingId=0" > ~/.android/ddms.cfg
[Edit to fix typo in script]