I've finally succeeded compiling Gingerbread (2.4) build on Ubuntu 14.04 and I think I wanna share the steps :)
1. Follow the steps to setup build env at Google's AOSP official site:
http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html
2. Download the source code:
http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html
The TAG for for Gingerbread I used is: android-2.3.6_r1, which is the version supported on Nexus One
3. Compile:
http://source.android.com/source/building-running.html
Here's the tricky part. Compilation will work seamlessly (without modding the source code) on GCC-4.4. Newer version of GCC has stricter code formatting, causing some parts of the project to fail.
One nice work-around I found online:
1. Download gcc-4.4: sudo apt-get install gcc-4.4-multilib g++-4.4-multilib
2. Make a folder where you create symlinks for gcc, g++, and cpp to gcc-4.4, g++-4.4, and g++-4.4 respectively
3. Override the PATH env, e.g. export PATH=$PWD:$PATH
This work-around is nice because you don't have to change your default gcc onto older version. Well, at least I don't want to :p
One caveat though, I find one project that still failed after this, which turned out to hard-code gcc path onto /usr/bin/gcc! Dang... So don't forget to modify this also:
diff --git a/WebCore/dom/make_names.pl b/WebCore/dom/make_names.pl
index 083e309..b6c942f 100755
--- a/WebCore/dom/make_names.pl
+++ b/WebCore/dom/make_names.pl
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ my %tags = ();
my %attrs = ();
my %parameters = ();
my $extraDefines = 0;
-my $preprocessor = "/usr/bin/gcc -E -P -x c++";
+my $preprocessor = "/usr/bin/gcc-4.4 -E -P -x c++";
Now compilation should succeed flawlessly! :)