Hi,
I am Sameer ,An EC student ,working in Mainframes.I have passion for Embedded Systems and Embedded OS.I want to buy a kit and I have installed Fedora 11 for the learning Driver programming.
Please let me know the availble kits in the market which are Cheap and Best. and also few freeware tools which can be used on Linux and Windows.
Thanks
Sameer
If you have a root around in the YUM repositorys I'm pretty sure that there is an Arm cross compiler available
pre-build, which is the biggest pain in setting up a Linux developement environment.
Dont forget however if it is a linux target your aiming for you can examine the main kernel driver source which will have plenty
of examples of device drivers for a multitude of platforms.
If its is a WindowsCE based target and you are ok with using C# you could try Sharpdevelop, and the last time I checked there were mutterings of adding the compact.net framework to the IDE.There are various other tools available for windows OS's and a quick google will bring plenty to light.
With regards to developement kits it really comes down to what your goals are, the simplest route is a cheap PDA etc..
For the more hands on Linux based project there are a lot more alternatives wrt dev kit and can become very application specific, Most Arm9 dev kits will be excellent learning tools as would the NOIS dev kit mentioned earlier however that would be a 2 fold learning curve with either verilog or VHDL then C for the Nois2 processor core.
If you fancy popping up mopre details on what areas your interested in, i'll be glad to root around for you.
AFAIK, microchip cpu's are at this moment in time unable to run a linux operating system due to a lack of MMU, however there was a port called m68k linux which didn't require an mmu and may be portable, but that is not a task for an inexperienced kernel developer. Would gladly be proved wrong on this fact 
A couple of interesting devices at the moment are the Beagleboard from TI and the Pandora console, details and links to both are on wikipedia.
Both are very capable devices and very rich feature sets in small form factors.
Kelv
