As soon as Android was released people got to work delving into the native side of things and now Macrobug has posted about how you can use Scratchpad to build ARM binaries for Android:

Benno explains how to build simple native programs for Android. But any significant pre-existing Linux software package uses a complex array of libraries and a correspondingly complicated build process, typically based around GNU Autoconf. That build process usually involves a “configure” script whose purpose is to run tiny programs to experiment with the system, to find out its capabilities and set up the code appropriately.

Terrific, except it doesn’t work if, say, you’re building on an Intel x86 box, but trying to build for Android, which is based around Linux and an entirely different CPU. Fortunately, the Scratchbox project exists to solve this problem. It provides you with a special Linux universe, which uses the QEMU emulator to run ARM binaries. Hence: autoconf can run its experiments and all will be well.

It worked surprisingly well and surprisingly simply. Good work by the Scratchbox team.

Maybe this is how Benno produced his strace binary which he used to dig up some interesting stuff from Android. I’m not sure. Either way, I’m going to be building strace here as an example of how to get this stuff to work.