This extensive technical article at IBM's developerWorks website by Anand K Santhanam and Vishal Kulkarni provides an thorough introduction to developing with Linux on PDAs and other embedded devices. Included are discussions of bootloaders, toolchains, kernel configuration, file system alternatives, gui and windowing software options and issues, and links to resources. Well worth a read!

Santhanam and Kulkarni write . . .

“If you're just starting out in embedded development, the wealth of available bootloaders, scaled-down distributions, filesystems, and GUIs can seem overwhelming. But this wealth of options is actually a boon, allowing you to tailor your development or user environment exactly to your needs.”

Linux is making steady progress in the embedded arena. “Because Linux is covered under the GPL (see Resources later in this article), anyone interested in customizing Linux to his PDA, palmtop, or wearable device can download the kernel and applications freely from the Internet and begin porting or developing. Many Linux flavors cater to the embedded/realtime market. These include RTLinux (Real-Time Linux), uclinux (Linux for MMUless devices), Montavista Linux (Linux distributions for ARM, MIPS, PPC), ARM-Linux (Linux on ARM), and others.”

“Embedded Linux development broadly involves three tiers: the bootloader, the Linux kernel, and the graphical user interface (or GUI). In this article, we will focus on some basic concepts involving these three tiers; we will provide some insights into how the bootloader, kernel, and filesystem interact; and we will investigate some of the numerous options available for the filesystem, GUI, and bootloaders . . .”

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