This problem has been reported for other systems – Jayway covers 64-bit Ubuntu, which is where I derived most of the info I needed (thanks guys!).

If you are developing Android apps using Eclipse, especially on 64-bit Fedora 16, then you too may have come across the error message:

Failed to get the adb version: Cannot run program "/home/[user]/[path]/android/[sdk]/tools/adb": java.io.IOException: error=2, No such file or directory

I did.

To fix it, you need to install 32-bit compatibility libraries.  On Ubuntu (and probably Debian) you can use the getlibs tools.  For Fedora users, it requires installing a few bits and pieces.  Easily accomplished with this:

su -
yum install libstdc++.i686 ncurses-libs.i686
 compat-libstdc++-33.i686


Yum will pull in the necessary dependencies.

Restart Eclipse and the error should disappear.