Gradle build runs forever on a clean install and an empty project
Try sudo apt-get install lib32z1 as in this post. I had the same problem on Lubuntu and fixed it this way.
In my case, i already had lib32z1 installed. The problem was Genymotion plugin.
Once i removed it from studio and restarted. It worked fine.
I still don't know how that could happen as i regularly use genymotion with studio in my other machines.
You can still run genymotion even if you remove studio plugin by starting emulator from genymotion itself.
I have centos 7 64 bits installed on a virtualbox 5.0.16 virtual machine and gradle version 2.10 with Android Studio 2.0
The log file of gradle is located at $HOME/.gradle/daemon/2.10 Log file: daemon-<some number>.out.log
By inspecting this log file I found out that libz.so.1 was not found by aapt.
Despite that command "locate libz.so.1" output was
/usr/lib64/libz.so/usr/lib64/libz.so.1/usr/lib64/libz.so.1.2.7aapt was not able to find it.
In order to solve the issue I had to execute
yum install zlib.i686After that Gradle started working.