I wrote this simple shell script using Zenity that lets you pick which avd you want to run. If you don't have ANDROID_HOME defined, you can just replace that with the full path to emulator. This would be easy to do with select instead of Zenity also, but I opted for Zenity since I'm running it from the xfce-application menu (though a .desktop-file).
#!/bin/sh
opt=$(zenity --title="Choose AVD" --text="Choose which emulator to start" --list \
--column="Devices" --separator="\n" `$ANDROID_HOME/emulator/emulator -list-avds`);
$ANDROID_HOME/emulator/emulator -avd $opt