I'd like to have a go of programming a microcontroller and obviously want to use Mandriva as my dev environment. There seem to be two main camps of popular microcontrollers, the AVR camp and the PIC camp. Both seem possible under Mandriva but I wondered if anyone here has experience of how easy they are to get going, how well supported they are by Linux software, any major advantages of one over the other, etc.

I have used PIC before and it was working well, but not done it for a long time.

The AVR i have been looking at for some other projects, but not tried programming or anything wiht the AVR from Linux..

Tell us how you get on it will probably make me decide to go the same way..