Any electronic engineers on here ??

[poptones]

There are oodles of 8051 tools that run in linux. But if you "hate pics"
why would you take up with AVRs  which are, essentially, hyper-pics? 

Pics are dirt cheap and powerful and Microchip tech is very friendly to
"the little guy" . What's there to hate? The newer ones especially are
so fast you can emulate the 8051 instruction set with assembler macros
and it'll still outrun most low end 8051s. 

I had a bunch of 8051 stuff so I know it's out there, but it's been so
long since I used any of it I can't even recall the names. But there
are gnu assemblers and emulators that use config files which allow you
to emulate pretty much any 8 bit embedded micro. Many of those pic
tools are based on these as well.

(disclaimer: I collaborated with Microchip on design of their
development tools, and I AM a bit biased on this.)


-- 
poptones