Scratchbox is a cross-compilation toolkit designed to make embedded Linux application development easier.
It also provides a full set of tools to integrate and cross-compile an entire Linux distribution.
Especially Debian is supported, but Scratchbox has also been used to cross-compile Slackware for ARM.
Developers with a good knowledge of Linux and software development have a relatively short learning curve with Scratchbox, two weeks should be enough to get up to speed.
Scratchbox provides a sandboxed build environment which offers a controlled set of tools and utilities needed for cross-compilation. It is an environment in which it is easy to assure that the intended versions of libraries, headers and other such files are used during the build. Most of the higher level software built using GNU Autotools do not cross-compile nicely in their as-is form, Scratchbox solves this problem by allowing the small test programs (used by the configure script to test for availability of features in the environment) to run transparenty either using an emulator or through "CPU-Transparency" on an actual target device . In practice software configuration and building using Scratchbox is quite identical to how it's done for the desktop.