The Android build is routinely tested in house on recent versions of Ubuntu LTS (10.04), but most distributions should have the required build tools available. Reports of successes or failures on other distributions are welcome.
Note: It is also possible to build Android in a virtual machine. If you are running Linux in a virtual machine, you will need at least 16GB of RAM/swap and 30GB or more of disk space in order to build the Android tree.
In general you will need:
Python 2.4 -- 2.7, which you can download from
python.org.
JDK 6 if you wish to build Gingerbread or newer; JDK 5 for Froyo or older. You can download both from
java.sun.com.
Detailed instructions for Ubuntu 10.04+ follow.