I bought four of those $5 boards, but I've had lots of difficulty getting answers to the same questions about option (1) that you ask. All the examples, it seems, are for the TI 16-bitters, and I don't see any substantial doc's for that tool suite.

Fortunately, you can use a "standard" GCC for the ARM under LINUX, which many people seem to have done with the "Raspberry Pi" board (RPi) and a fellow I know has LINUX running on one of those with an SD card and a USB-interfaced SATA HDD. I was looking for something more comprehensive, but the one board I found, advertised by SparkFun, has been discontinued. Sadly, it's the only one I've encountered that has (had) an IDE interface and I have lots of large and fast PATA drives I'm not using.

I'd prefer to assemble or compile my code for this MCU on a similar MCU with the GNU tools. I've always preferred debugging the code on a native tool set rather than using cross-software and simulators, unless I have my own simulator. I have, of course, used cross-assemblers for some MCU's, but it's a lot more comfortable running the code on the target MCU.

RE