what's a good place to start?

in size?

well, somebody in my old training company (he posts in thsi NG, too) teleld
me that Elinos has an IDE.
There you can develop nearly like in any other programming language.

I have used it myself for programming an radio link control interface...



maybe...
try this
http://www.google.de/search?q=embedded+linux+howto

;o)

there are too many...

-- MMilitsch

You should try taking a class from Karim Yaghmour or buying his book as a
starting point.
He does a great job of showing you how to build an entire distro from the
ground up.
Building Embedded Linux systems.... a must have for people starting out with
Linux.  There are multiple options for slimming down your distribution that
are discussed in the class and the book.  I personally thought the class was
well worth the $$...

Best Regards,

Edwin Bland


Mb
teleld

Does your desktop PC support booting from USB devices?  If so, you can
learn a lot with just a $20 USB "pen drive" and your desktop PC.  No
need to buy any new computer or install a development kit.  Turn your
USB disk into a bootable little Linux system.  Some things to try:

* Get it to boot to a command line.

* Replace /sbin/init with your own program that does something
interesting.

* Run a GUI like KDrive or a program you wrote with Allegro.

* Run Apache and some interesting webapp

* Set it up so it just has a kernel and initrd image and boots into a
read only filesystem in memory.

* See how many different kinds of PCs you can get it to boot on,
including configuring networking, audio, video, etc...

 Hi

  Maybe you should have a look at

   "www.uClinux.org"

  you can actually build a system in good time provided you don't mind
  spending a few $'s in getting the required infrastructure...a microcontroller  
  kit..or even an FPGA prototyping board....

 Cheers

 Anand
(www.tenet.res.in)