What you can do when your Android Studio could not start AVD on Ubuntu 18.04

After experiencing repeated sudden system crashes, I decided to update my Linux environment. Since then, my Android Studio stopped working properly. Several problems were found with the AVD, JVM and Gradle project sync and so forth. And I needed to spend my weekend fixing one problem after another.

I had kvm installed, added myself to its users group and rebooted the system.

Still it didn’t make any difference. The IDE kept showing the message “Error while waiting for device: Could not start AVD” and would never start the emulator.

This gave no clue what was going on. There had to be permission problems, I suspected. I changed the permission of the directory.

Of course, I knew it is usually not a good idea. Granting the full control permission to everyone would pose a threat to the entire system and even possibly cause another problem. But it worked, anyway. As I changed the directory permission, I became able to build apps using Android studio.

Unfortunately, the case was not yet closed. In the following hours, I got another system crash and had to reinstall the whole system from a bootable flash drive. My workstation contained NVIDIA and CUDA property drivers that conflicted with some other modlues from time to time. They froze all the processes and threads. I could not even raise skinny elephants.

So I reinstalled Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on my workstation and tried building apps with the latest Android Studio.

This time, I could open the AVD by simply adding myself to kvm user group. And it worked well! I didn’t do anything other than newly install a series of the required virtualization tools and add a new user. And it worked!

Now I really don’t know what prevented the IDE from running the virtual machine.