MPLAB is the IDE recommended by the ECE department. It can be run inside a Virtual Machine, programming using USB passthrough. It can also be installed under wine and the compiler used from the commandline. [http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/index.php sdcc ] is reported to work, and pikdev has a GPL C compiler with some support for PIC devices. Some GNU utilities (namely the PIC assembler and linker, but not compiler) have been modified to support Microchip's microprocessors as wellpart of the [http://gputils.sourceforge.net/ gputils project]. [http://piklab.sourceforge.net/ Piklab] is an IDE with support for both open source toolchains.