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Everyone who works on microcontrollers knows that MPLAB is a great IDE when it comes to programming and interfacing with Microchip's PIC and dsPIC microcontrollers. But like many other softwares, it runs only on Windows and there is no official Linux port as yet(and neither does one seem to be in the offing). And the popularity of Linux has been increasing of late and more and more people are switching over from Windows to Linux. One can always try running it on Wine, but it's definitely not close to having a software that is native to the platform in which you are working. But no fear, for PIKLAB is here.

Piklab is an IDE for applications based on Microchip PIC and dsPIC microcontrollers similar to the MPLAB environment. It integrates with several compiler and assembler toolchains (like gputils, sdcc, c18) and with the GPSim simulator. It supports the most common programmers (serial, parallel, ICD2, Pickit2, PicStart+), the ICD2 debugger, and several bootloaders like Tiny, Pickit2 and Picdem. It can be found at http://piklab.sourceforge.net. Though the page says that it being a beta software, is prone to contain bugs, you'll surprised at how good and neat it is.

Some of the features of Piklab include:

• Compiling, assembling and linking with several compilers like GNU PICUtilities, Small device C compiler, CCX, MPC, CC5X compilers etc.
• Programming with ICD 1&2, Pickit 1&2, PicStart+, TinyBootloader etc.
• Debugging with run, halt, step, single breakpoint and read, watch and write registers.
• Several other tools and command line utilities.

ICD2 is reportedly supported on both serial and USB interfaces with options to automatically upload the firmware. With features such as this, and the BIG advantage of being an open source project, Piklab is definitely a great IDE for working with Microchip's PIC microcontrollers. There is no more any need to lament that MPLAB doesn't work on Linux! Piklab has now been added to the UBUNTU repos. So UBUNTU users can simply apt-get it using

sudo apt-get install piklab

Others can easily download it from http://piklab.sourceforge.net/download.php.
Enjoy working with PICs(yeah, they are great microcontrollers) using PIKLAB.

cheers
Aravind