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Android Emulator in Linux with VNC and without GPU support


If you want to run your Android Emulator remotely by using a VNC server like TigerVNC, or perhaps TightVNC you will find that you will only get a Black Screen.

Some folks solved this by enabling host GPU usage, but what if you have a difficult video card to work with?

For example, I could not manage to find proper drivers for an XG21 Z9s/Z9m card, and couldn't manage to use the GPU, so the black screen was still there.

Diving into the GPU Emulation documentation of QEMU inside the android emulator page, I found a few options that were really useful to find the right solution.

The options -sdl and and -gpu mesa can be used in order to make the emulator use software for the GPU instead of trying to use the native GPU of the video card, so in the end, I ran the emulator like this:

And finally I was able to see the Android Emulator working right off in a VNC session. :)