Do-it-yourself embedded Linux development tools
Do it yourself
The do-it-yourself approach has many advantages, such as the resulting tool is free, not tied to any particular Linux distribution, customized for your needs, and most importantly, it's modular. This lets you quickly port to a new platform only the functionality that you really need.
Now, let's take a look at the most common development tasks and see how they can be automated and simplified using open-source tools. We'll also try to bind it all together to form something similar to IDE, although it's not really necessary--every tool described here can be used by itself. Note that all network-related examples assume that all networking components reside on the same LAN with a 192.168.0.0/24 subnet; 192.168.0.9 is assumed to be host address and 192.168.0.10 the target.
Host platform
Although everything I will describe can be also done on a Windows host, I recommend using Linux. It's more convenient, and more tools and utilities are available. And if you rely on a few Windows applications such as Word and Outlook, you can still run them on Linux in emulation using VirtualBox, Wine, or other commercial package. If you're new to Linux, using a Linux host will also force you to learn the new platform faster.
Writing code
Many developers have definite preferences with regard to programming editors, and there are many open-source and commercial Linux packages to choose from. Emacs is my favorite, as it has all the required features (and much more) and most probably will be installed on every Linux host.
Emacs is a powerful editor, but it requires a bit of configuration to unleash it's power. I recommend enabling at least the following options: global font-lock mode for syntax highlighting, imenu-add-menubar-index to show a list of C functions defined in the current file as a drop-down menu, and cscope (which is a separate package with Emacs integration support) tags for fast search and code browsing. You can either change individual options through Emacs' Options menu, or just cut and paste the example in Listing 1 into your .emacs file.
I recommend running the compilation process inside Emacs. Having the following keyboard shortcut will make it more convenient:
(global-set-key 'f5 'compile)
Emacs has many other features that a programmer would find handy, such as version control integration, auto-completion, matching parentheses, auto-indentation, C macro expansion, gdb debugger integration, and code folding (for further reading, I suggest "Emacs for programmers," www.linuxjournal.com/article/2821 and "Using Cscope and SilentBob to analyze source code," www.linux.com/article.pl? sid=07/03/05/1715201). And don't forget to print the Emacs reference card (refcard.ps) that came with your Emacs installation.
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