I'm also one of those who has no windows machines at home.
For PICs, at first I tried asm with gputils, which was great for
general understanding of "how things work" but seemed much too
difficult to implement even simple operations. Then I tried DSCC,
which actually worked fine for me, but then I tried JAL and am still
using that.
As for SDCC, people kept telling that it's not very good for PIC's,
but I do not remember ever being actually stopped by sdcc bug. The way
I used it was just do things simplest way possible, keeping in mind
how things would be done in asm. Do not use too heavy structures or
algorithms and it will work just fine.
I'm doing it the same way in JAL.
One thing that bothers me is that seems like JAL is not (yet) using
new features of extended midrange, especially those related to
interrupt routines, automatic context saving.
Anyway, that is one excellent tool kit, with all those examples and
libs. It does not really asks for a heavy learning of another
language, as it's syntax is very simple.

By the way, I'm currently migrating from old ubuntu 10.10 to a fresh
debian. Ubuntu is useless since switching to Unity. I still do not
have PIC-related tools installed on debian.

One thing that probably will require some attention is pk2cmd tool,
with it's device file, which will have to be updated to support newer
extended midrange pics.

> Yes, I did, I think I might still have a  version of it in my backups (on=
 CD's,
> that old!) I remember that it had limited support for PIC's and that was =
the
> reason I eventually moved to CCS C.  I did use PIC C lite from HiTech for=
 a
> while.  This (electronics, PICs) is my hobby, even though it spills over =
into my
> professional life once in a while.  Definitly helps to talk with "profess=
ional"
> engineers, and sometime give them an advise on how to do something with a
> PIC :-).
>
> I also looked at JAl.  It did look like a very nice system.  I was not up=
 to
> learning another language at the time though.
>
> It is interesting that people have implemented languages that were develo=
ped for
> large computers for PICs, such as Forth, Pascal-like etc. but not somethi=
ng like
> Tcl.  Is there a specific reason for this, or just Tcl is not well known?
>
> Jeff, if I may ask, what falvor of Linux you are using?  I use OpenSuse.
>
> Sergey Dryga
> http://beaglerobotics.com
>

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