Wasted way too much time getting Atmel's stuff up and running. There's an SDRAM chip on the board, an old port of FreeRTOS, and no mention of how to get everything working. Hopefully this will help you get going a little faster.

Everything here assumes your IDE is a plain ol' text editor, and you do your building with Make/GCC. I can't help you with IAR, or C++.

Atmel's ASF is very rigid and a pain in the butt for path structure. There's not a pretty way to setup your environment. I've tried to abstract the ASF's structure away as much as possible, but I can't fix everything. It's not a good idea to make an ASF-replacement-for-autoconf, or modify the ASF's files. If you can think of a simple, non-complicated way to improve on this, please let me know!

• Get the board here for about $32.
• Make an account with atmel so you can download their super secret files
• Download the dev board documentation
• Download the avr32 toolchain and header files for linux here
• Download the ASF here
• Extract all three downloads to ~/atmel or /opt
• Symlink or move the headers into the toolchain (see below)
• Add the avr32 toolchain to your path by sourcing setup_env.sh in your ~/.bashrc
• Install dfu-programmer (Ubuntu 12.04 has this in their repos)
• Add an entry in udev for the uc3a3 board so you don't need to run sudo. Restart udev

Directory names have been truncated for sanity's sake.

~/atmel
~/atmel/asf-3.17.0 (Atmel's "drivers" here)
~/atmel/atmel-headers
~/atmel/avr32-gnu-toolchain/
Symlink ~/atmel/avr32-gnu-toolchain/avr32/include/avr32 to ~/atmel/atmel-headers/avr32

NOTE: Put or symlink your projects in asf/avr32/applications

project/
project/board (If you spin your own board)
project/board/gcc (Run "make dfu" here)

cd led-blink/xplained/gcc
# (Here, jump reset to ground while holding SW0 down.)
make -j8 dfu

Q: I'm getting this error from make:

No rule to make target `avr32/applications/led-blink/main.o', needed by `led-blink.elf'.

A: Don't forget to symlink led-blink into avr32/applications. It's Atmel's annoying directory structure.