This book tries to cover a range of hardware and aspects of ARMLinux. It assumes that you are at least a competent computer user, more likely an experienced developer, but perhaps not very familiar with GNU/Linux or the ARM and its development platforms.
There are many things that are specific to different items of hardware, and many things that are common across various devices. We have tried to avoid too much repetition, but we have also tried to make the text reasonably linear in the hardware chapters. This is inevitably a compromise. In general you should find that reading through the relevant hardware chapter will get you going, but will not go into much depth about why you are doing things and what other options there might be at each stage. We refer to other chapters that have more details on each aspect (using JFlash, patching the kernel, etc) throughout these texts. If you have feedback on the book we'd be very happy to have it, so as to improve future versions - see Chapter 13.
In a fast-moving field like this, this book will always be a work-in-progress. We give the current state of the art at the time of writing, but recognise that this will soon change. Thus we try to provide links to the places online where you can get the latest info. When you find things that are out of date, of just plain wrong, please tell us.
There will be future editions covering more devices and more subject areas. Things that will definately be in the next release are coverage of porting the kernel to a new ARM device, more information for developers using a Windows host PC rather than a Linux one, and more on debugging and simulation techniques.
The Aleph ARMLinux CD
If you have bought this book as part of our Aleph ARMLinux distribution then be aware that this follows the hallowed GNU/Linux principle of releasing early and often. The distribution is not yet finely tuned to the needs of various embedded devices. It has parts that are specific to small ARM devices, and parts which are generic, but assume a desktop environment. The specific part contains this document, kernels, utiltites and RAMdisks suitable for the devices covered in the book, pre-compiled x86/ARM toolchains, and current kernel source and ARM patches. The generic part form the bulk of the distribution and is essentially the standard Debian ARM distribution, containing a huge array of packages and all the corresponding sources. These are very useful, providing an enormous library of things that you can run on your ARM hardware, but the Debian installer is not yet set up to install to embedded systems. You need to make your own RAMdisks from the parts available to use these binaries. There are several projects underway to make this process easier, including CML2+OS from http://www.emdebian.org/ which is included. Future releases will have significant improvements in this area.
Have fun!
