I spent some time putting together a toolchain to program this board in Linux. Right now, if you have a FTDI or other USB-to-serial cable, then you can program this board without Linux. I’m working right now to see if I can put together a FTDI-less solution using wine and vstool.exe. I’ll update the README on github if I find a soluion.
Here’s a link to the toolchain code: https://github.com/asymingt/vs1000d-linux
Cheers Andrew