UPDATE: I start this section because i was shocked on the decison of Nokia to use linux for 770, but after one year i can say that results are differents from revolution i imagined. However i think that can be considered the first step for linux on massive used cellphones & palms.
Maemo is developed by Nokia for developing applications for handheld devices, actually is used for 770 platform, new products that is planned to debupt on 3 quarter of 2005.

The technology used to develop the software is based on various opensource projects, and also developer platform have the same philosophy.

The development environment use Scratchbox rootstrap and offer development libraries for x86 and for ARM (link). The goal is to develop under a different tecknology (x386) avoiding the problem about autoconf/automake under a different environment where you can’t operate for develop directly, because of the absence of a specified compiler (embedded devices). For make this it use Cpu Transparency and Qemu that is a requirement for Scratchbox.

The core of developing is Hildon Application framework based on Gnome.

Like we can see in schema upon Linux kernel various platform Libraries support Hildon Application Framework that supply the services for developing applications.

[draft]
KERNEL

Platform Library Layers
Matchbox http://matchbox.handhelds.org/
GTK+ http://www.gtk.org/
GConf http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/
Xserver x
D-BUS http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/dbus
GnomeFS