4. Setting-up Development Environment on a Linux Box

You need to install and configure these things for ARM development:

• arm-elf-linux gcc compiler
• arm-elf-linux binutils (ld, objcopy, etc..)
• header and link files for your microcontroller
• startup code, rtos, bootloader

4.1 Compiling gcc and binutils

• Create a directory that will hold all files for compilation
• Download latest gcc (I was using 4.0.0) and binutils (2.16) to the newly created directory
• Extract gcc and binutils tar file
• Create build-gcc and build-binutils directories
• From build-binutils directory call: "../binutils-2.16/configure --target=arm-elf --prefix=/usr/local/arm7; make all install"
• From build-gcc directory call: "../gcc-4.0.0/configure --target=arm-elf --prefix=/usr/local/arm7 --enable-languages=c --with-newlib; make all-gcc install-gcc"

And you are done! The directory /usr/local/arm7 contains almost complete development suite for ARM7 microcontroller development.

At this point you don't have libc-like library, but from my point of view this is not necessary as for embedded development you will need only a few standard functions (like strcmp, memcpy, ...).