A variety of personal digital assistants (PDA's) are available in the marketplace, some with an embedded version of Linux. These small handhelds are remarkably powerful and are blurring the line between the embedded and desktop worlds. The number and variety of potential applications provide significant opportunities for developers.

This talk presents our experience in getting a particular PDA development environment to a reasonably mature state, culminating in a developer's CDROM that automates the creation of that environment. Topics to be covered include:

• establishing the development environment on a Linux workstation
• establishing serial connectivity from workstation to target PDA
• concocting a simple power supply for the PDA
• porting kernel images etc. from workstation to PDA
• the developers CD-ROM