nRF5x development in Ubuntu / Debian

Updated 2016-12-23:

When developing for nRF51822, nRF52832, you need some header files etc. There is a set of unofficial Debian packages which facilitates downloading the MDK, the SDK, the BLE softdevices and the command line tools from Nordic Semiconductor, and then "install" the files into a standardized Debian location.

You can find these packages here: https://launchpad.net/~saltmakrell/+archive/ubuntu/nordic/+packages

Below it is described how to take advantage of this for Ubuntu.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saltmakrell/nordic

sudo apt update

aptitude search "nrf5x.*"

This will list a number of SDK versions and BLE softdevice versions which you can choose from. When you have found what you want, run:

sudo apt install 

Note that the packages themselves do not contain the files. The packages contain scripts which download the files from the Nordic Semiconductor web page. Also the SHA-256 checksum is verified so that you can trust what is downloaded.