How to Install Ubuntu Touch Emulator on Ubuntu 16.04

Want to experience Ubuntu Phone but can’t buy a real one? The good news is you can play around with the device by installing Ubuntu touch emulator which just require 512M RAM and 4GB disk space on your computer.

Install Ubuntu Touch Emulator on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

It’s very easy to do. Here’s the steps.

Fire up a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run this command to install it.

sudo apt install ubuntu-emulator

Once it’s installed, type the below command to create an instance. Replace ubuntuphone with your preferred name for this instance.

sudo ubuntu-emulator create ubuntuphone --arch=i386

This command will download latest built image of Ubuntu touch from the developer channel by default. You can also create multiple instances for different purposes, just give it a different name. The --arch=i386 will create a i386 instance which provides faster performance than the default armhf architecture.

If you see the following DNS error:

Get https://system-image.ubuntu.com/channels.json: dial tcp: lookup system-image.ubuntu.com on 127.0.1.1:53: server misbehaving

Then you have to change your DNS server from the default 127.0.0.1 to other public DNS server by editing a configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

Change name server settings to the following.

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 8.8.8.8

Save and close the file. The above 3 IP addresses are OpenDNS and Google DNS server.

When the instance is created, execute this command to run it. Again, replace the instance name.

ubuntu-emulator run ubuntuphone

Be default, 512MB RAM is allocated to an instance. For a smoother experience, you can allocate more RAM to the emulator. Simply add --memory option to the command, for instance:

ubuntu-emulator run ubuntuphone --memory=1024

The above command gives the instance 1GB of RAM.

To scale down the emulator interface, you can add --scale option like this.

ubuntu-emulator run ubuntuphone --memory=1024 --scale=0.7

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