I had this error while installing Android sdk today:
error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
When I locate the file it was there but it seemed to look in the wrong place. So I was setting path’s and making symlinks but that did not solve the problem. The solution is actually more simple:
yum install glibc.i686 glibc-devel.i686 libstdc++.i686 zlib-devel.i686 ncurses-devel.i686 libX11-devel.i686 libXrender.i686 libXrandr.i686
The reason this happens is because you are using a 64 bit system and the android sdk is 32 bit. The packages above are the 32bit packages.
If it still doesn’t work you need to set your path.
More info on the Fedora Wiki.