During this year there will be coming couple sub-600€ multi-touch portable computers that contain Tegra2. They bring me to a good excuse to learning ARM assembly language. But I have no clue where to start from aside the arm.com.
For first throw I could just pick up an emulator with a linux distribution in it. But which emulator and distro would work best on this one? Having access to the host system’s files would be okay so I could compile and execute ARM binaries straight from my home-directory.
I wouldn’t want to waste much money to books so I’d need some assembly source code examples and a good free introduction to the instruction set. gcc compiler flags for compiling ARM programs on x86 would be also nice but I might find them out myself as well.
Obtain an evaluation version of of one of the arm software toolkits which will include a debugger/software emulator. If you’re willing to spend a few hundred dollars, obtain an arm eval board (Keil sells a few). You can test your code on the board via a JTAG interface and see what happens on real hardware.
These should get your going in the right direction
Disclosure: I work for ARM.