With some adapted help from this
thread I was able to get the hardware simulator up and running on Ubuntu 14.04
Steps were:
1- Download and unzip the software
2-in a terminal:$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre && apt-get install libgcj14
3- in a terminal:$ dash HardwareSimulator.sh
or whichever other simulator you want to run
if this doesnt read the command line error and see if it wants you to download other dependencies
good luck!