Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

Overview of this book

Android NDK is used for multimedia applications that require direct access to system resources. NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn allows a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. This is a hands-on guide to extending your game development skills with Android NDK. The book takes you through many clear, step-by-step example applications to help you further explore the features of Android NDK and some popular C++ libraries and boost your productivity by debugging the development process. Through the course of this book, you will learn how to write portable multi-threaded native code, use HTTP networking in C++, play audio files, use OpenGL ES 3, and render high-quality text. Each chapter aims to take you one step closer to building your application. By the end of this book, you will be able to create an engaging, complete gaming application.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Android NDK
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using Android command-line tools on Linux


Installation on Linux is as easy as its OS X counterpart.

Note

Indeed, Linux development environment is truly native for all kinds of Android development since all the toolchains and Android Open Source Project are based on Linux tools.

Here, we will point out just some differences. First of all, we don't need to install Homebrew. Just go with the available package manager. On Ubuntu, we prefer using apt. The following are the steps to install the packages as well as set path on Linux:

  1. Let's start with updating all apt packages and installing the default Java Development Kit:

    $ sudo apt-get update
    $ sudo apt-get install default-jdk
    
  2. Install the Apache Ant build automation tool:

    $ sudo apt-get install ant
    
  3. Install Gradle:

    $ sudo apt-get install gradle
    
  4. Download the official Android SDK which suits your version of Linux from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html, and unpack it into a folder in your home directory:

    $ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r24.0.2-linux.tgz
    $ tar –xvf android-sdk_r24.0.2-linux.tgz
    
  5. Download the official NDK package suitable for your Linux, 32- or 64-bit, and run it:

    $ wget http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r10e-linux-x86_64.bin
    $ chmod +x android-ndk-r10e-linux-x86_64.bin
    $ ./android-ndk-r10e-linux-x86_64.bin
    

    The executable will unpack the content of the NDK package into the current directory.

  6. Now you can set up the environment variables to point to the actual folders:

    NDK_ROOT=/path/to/ndk
    ANDROID_HOME=/path/to/sdk
    

    Note

    It is useful to add environment variables definitions to /etc/profile or /etc/environment. This way these settings will be applicable to all the users of the system.