Jonathan Lalou's blog

Two days ago, I twitted this:

Windows I hate you “PANIC: Could not open AVD config file”

Indeed, I tried to run an AVD (Android Virtual Device) from IntelliJ IDEA, in order to test my Android application. So far, I always ran AVD from KUbuntu, but a specific need I had to run on Windows Seven. The emulator could not start, because it was searching the actual AVD img file in the default folder, eg C:\Documents and Settings\<yourLogin>\.android\avd on Windows XP. Unfortunately, the folder could not be retrieved (a story of French special characters, such as ‘é’, ‘è’, ‘ç’, etc.).
Therefore, the question is: on Windows, how to change AVD default location?

I tried many more or less tricky solutions, but the simplest is the following:

• close IDEA and AVD Manager
• create an environment variable ANDROID_SDK_HOME (keys Windows + Pause), pointing to your target folder, eg: D:\workarea\honeycomb-sdk
• create a .android subfolder, eg: D:\workarea\honeycomb-sdk\.android
  • if Windows does not allow you to create a folder of which name starts with a dot, then create it through Cygwin’s mkdir.
• startup IDEA

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