A guide for installing the tools necessary to build up a homebrew barebones Arduino Zero (based on the Atmel SAMD21G18A microcontroller) on a Linux PC. While this guide is written for a Debian-based distribution such as Linux Mint, it should be adaptable to other distributions fairly easily.
This guide also assumes that we will be using the ATMEL-ICE debugger to write the Arduino bootloader to the SAMD21G18A flash memory via the Cortex Debug Connector.
You'll need a recent version of the Arduino IDE which has support for the Arduino Zero in the Boards Manager. As of this writing, the latest stable version is 1.6.5, so be sure to use at least this version. Also as of this writing, the version of the Arduino IDE in the Linux Mint repositories is quite old, so don't use that one.