Hi there
I'm a student here at Loughborough university in the UK. Every year, people 
taking my degree have to take a course where we have to make an ARM AEB1 (with 
ARM7DI core) turn magically into an MP3 player. Of course, it's a rubbish MP3 
player, but nonetheless we have to do it to get marks.
Questions:
1) I am trying to use the arm-elf-*** set of tools both under Linux RH7.2 and 
Cygwin. I have no idea where the cygwin tools came from, but I can trace back 
the heritage of the arm-elf-*** tools under linux to the guy at uni who 
installed them. Which system would you guys recommend I use to do the 
development, bearing in mind the cygwin machine is my home machine and the 
linux machine is not on a network and only has a floppy drive and a CD drive.
2) Aside from the above recommendation, I have been playing with the configure 
script under both systems, but I am a little shakey in my knowledge of what it 
does exactly. Could someone explain it's precise function (or an approximation 
of it, any way)
3) With respect to my playing around with ./configure, I am having problems 
getting it to recognise my cross compiler both under Linux AND Cygwin. I know 
enough about configure to know that it's going to try to detect gcc, the type 
of host etc., and take some parameters/options which help it build a makefile 
for my target. So, when I do
shell$ CC=/usr/local/bin/arm-elf-gcc ./configure --target=arm-elf  
I get this in config.log:
configure:744: checking for a BSD compatible install
configure:797: checking whether build environment is sane
configure:854: checking whether make sets ${MAKE}
configure:900: checking for working aclocal
configure:913: checking for working autoconf
configure:926: checking for working automake
configure:939: checking for working autoheader
configure:952: checking for working makeinfo
configure:980: checking host system type
configure:1005: checking for gcc
configure:1118: checking whether the C compiler (gcc  ) works
configure:1134: gcc -o conftest    conftest.c  1>&5
/usr/local/arm-elf/bin/ld: cannot open crt0.o: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
configure: failed program was:
#line 1129 "configure"
#include "confdefs.h"
main(){return(0);}
I copied across the crt0.o file I have (full of ARM assembly) to the directory 
where I am running configure, and the error progresses to 
...SNIP
configure:952: checking for working makeinfo
configure:980: checking host system type
configure:1005: checking for gcc
configure:1118: checking whether the C compiler (gcc  ) works
configure:1134: gcc -o conftest    conftest.c  1>&5
/usr/local/arm-elf/bin/ld: cannot find -lc
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
configure: failed program was:
#line 1129 "configure"
#include "confdefs.h"
main(){return(0);}
I am no expert in these matters, but if someone could point me in the right 
direction, I'd be appreciative. I know that copying across the compiler runtime 
object file (crt0.o) into the same directory as configure isn't going to be the 
fix, but I just did it to debug what's going on, and it looks like when my arm-
elf-*** tools are compiling anywhere but in a subdirectory of themselves, it 
doesn't know where it's files are.
regards
Alex
***************************************************************************
Alex Netterville.  
Student - Third Year - Electronics and Software Engineering (MEng)
Loughborough University