[TriEmbed] AVR Dragon on Linux

[Brian]

Hiya,

I'm cross-posting this to TriLUG and triembed.  In my ongoing efforts to 
further divorce myself from Windows on the desktop (mistyped that 
"Sindows" the first time... Freudian slip?) at home, I find one tie that 
is difficult to cut to be the combination of Atmel Studio and the AVR 
Dragon in-circuit emulator.

Atmel distributes GCC-based cross-compilation tools for Linux, and there 
are third-party FOSS tools such as AVaRICE and avrdude for programming 
and debugging the hardware.  Unfortunately, when I try to use those 
tools with my Dragon connected to a target via the one-wire debugWire 
interface, the communication between Dragon and target seems very fickle 
and error-prone (whereas the identical physical setup works just fine 
with Atmel Studio on Windows).  In particular, communication timeouts 
occur frequently, both when trying to program the device and trying to 
debug it.

Has anyone on this list tackled the Linux/debugWire/Dragon...er...dragon 
before, and perhaps defeated it?  The Atmel toolchain is one of my last 
remaining strong ties to Windows...

Thanks,
-Brian