Wha? Give in that easily? The only apparent problem right now is the conversion from C to assembly. <s>The free C compiler I saw only does 16f, but someone might just add 18f support by the time we get to January.</s> If not, then wine might do the job. Hopefully, we can just make a sort of wrapper around the compiler that sets things up and runs wine.
And if all else fails, assembly doesn't look that hard.
I don't dual boot, I just have two hard drives with windows on one and linux on the other. It's annoying to switch around so I have a good reason to hold on to my uptime. Last year, I just wrote most of the code on my laptop, moved it over to the engineer's laptop and finished things there.
Edit: I just checked again, and it looks like the SDCC does support 18f. I dunno if it does 18f8520, but it's that much more likely to work now. Now the problem is that SDCC probably uses a different C than the "official" compiler.