[twobob]

hmm...

It's up to you. if the project is BIG then you will NEED to cross compile.

if the project is TINY you could use something like tcc on the device.

in the "middle" is the grey area. The osmo, galculator and a few other bits (star-dict) I have actually built ON THE KINDLE touch.

This has many advantages to the layman, easy to include lib headers (apt-get libwhatever-dev), stable, plenty of "native arm" versions of possibly complicated libs to compile, dependency resolution.

The final choice I suppose would be the toolchain (or something like Buildroot that provides a Toolchain) and there there are few options now... Assuming you are focusing down binaries for your device and later only... The Linaro stuff or Code Sourcery and probably an awful lot more...

okay... All that said, let's presume you want an on-device solution...


AN ON-DEVICE SOLUTION::

If you are LOOKING for an "on device" solution I would suggest:
Debian Wheezy via grip (important as SID is now NOT making stuff our libc can run)
(I have a few sizes of this already built 500MB, 1Gb and 2Gb)

root@kindle:/# apt-get install libtool build-essential ccache automake
I would guess that this would, with the debian grip guts, weigh in around 320 MB)

(then inside debian)
root@kindle:/# mkdir -p /mnt/us/extensions
(on my system that becomes /mnt/us/debian/mnt/us/extensions)

build stuff like:
root@kindle:/# ./configure --prefix=/mnt/us/extensions/{thing}/usr <other options>

root@kindle:/# make clean; PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH make ; make install

then MOVE(/COPY) the /mnt/us/debian/mnt/us/extensions stuff to /mnt/us/extensions from outside the chroot.

and run it to test it.

perhaps KNC1 will be kind enough to let me update those debian images somewhere to replace the older ones I believe he is currently hosting.

Hope that helps.