As you might already know, the source code of AndroidKnight is available, being released under GPL3, making it one of the few chess games (if not the only) free – as in freedom – on the Android platform.
You might clone the mercurial repository from here:
http://androidknight.hg.sourceforge.net:8000/hgroot/androidknight/androidknight
and you can download a preconfigured virtual machine (with ubuntu 9.10, eclipse and android development tools installed, and eclipse configured to build and run androidknight) from here:
http://download.androidknight.com/androidknight-developer-machine/
All you need is VirtualBox, and you can import the virtual machine into it. It might work also under VMWare but I haven’t tested it.