I am installing Jenkins for my gradle based android builds.
My server is running Debian 6.0 but gradle on that platform is currently in "unstable / testing" phase. This is not surprising given how much I had to wrestle with it with android studio, it didn't seem ready, but this is conjecture.
I got my gradle package from here http://packages.debian.org/sid/gradle but after unzipping the tar I was confronted with some files and I couldn't find the file that would let me install it from the terminal. the bootstrap.sh file produces many errors... not sure I am going down the right path here
insight appreciated
Try just using the Jenkins Gradle Plugin.
You configure your gradle installations in Manage Jenkins -> Configure System
You have 2 options for configuring your gradle installs for jenkins:
Choose "Install automatically" option - this will download whatever version of gradle you specify from Gradle.org into your $JENKINS_HOME/tools directory - this is the easiest option
Set the GRADLE_HOME field to point to an existing Gradle install - you can just download a binaries-only distribution of gradle and unzip it somewhere
In your job, jenkins will execute gradle using the full path like $JENKINS_HOME/tools/hudson.plugins.gradle.GradleInstallation/Gradle_1.8/bin/gradle, so you don't need to worry about the gradle executable being on your PATH or in /usr/bin or anything like that.
I don't think you really need to mess w/ a Debian package if you just want to use gradle within Jenkins.
Hope that helps! :)