Linux – Android Emulator on Arch Linux

Presuming you are on a 32-bit machine, or 64-bit Arch has 32-bit support libraries, it should work. You also need some form of java installed, as the front end to the emulator is java based, and probably 2 GB+ RAM.

I'm not sure if Google distributes the emulator separately from the SDK (software development kit) -- presumably it needs a good part of that anyway.

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

In the tools/ directory, there is an executable called monitor. Fire that up and you'll see a big multi-window GUI app. Top left corner there'll be two little icons, of which the right hand side one looks like a tiny smartphone. That will launch the "Android Virtual Device Manager", where you can create and launch virtual devices.

You can also use ./android avd in the tools/ directory to start the device manager directly.

The emulator is QEMU based, so you could dig around and find out if there are images you can use with QEMU sans everything else (but the above route is probably easier).

You can also install the android-sdk and the emulator using the Archlinux User Repository (aur). Here is the android archlinux wiki page.