Can you give some pointers on how to connect to the Eventide H8000FW with VSig via Wine? I can get VSig running on Wine but it doesn't do anything when I try to download the dbase. I'm assuming I need to map the com port to the Keyspan adaptor I'm using somehow but am not sure how.

Sorry but I don't know of anyone here who has tried this, and I personally haven't used Wine enough to guess at how well it virtualizes the serial hardware (if at all).

I use VMware when I need to develop on Windows.  You might also try VirtualBox, which is a free VM hypervisor.  These tend to have good support for virtualizing hardware peripherals.  The downside of course is the need to have a whole Windows installation on your machine.