Ben and Ken, Wine does have support for both USB and serial ports. With serial you need to create a text file in the application config directory connecting the device on your machine with a com port. With USB I think it's handled in the Wine control panel. Also, if you own a copy of Windows you can install it in virtualbox and then, especially if you have the memory on your machine to support it, both performance and flexibility is almost as good as it would be if you actually had a Windows PC there. It even does accelerated 3D. But wine will run around 1/2 to 2/3 of Windows programs if you are willing to fuss with it enough. Can be time consuming getting it to work sometimes, though.