I installed Wine which was unexpectedly painless, and pulled in the controlSuite dir tree into my CCSv5 setup which seemed to work. I went thru the CPU Timer example and hit a small bump in the road as there is a typo which might not be detected under Win due to case insensitivity (DSP2802x_I2c_defines.h vs DSP2802x_I2C_defines.h ... I just made an extra copy of the file and that fixed the problem). It compiled, debugged, appears to run on the board (to the extent I haven't yet read what it's supposed to do, but the lights are actuated by the left button now). It is waaaay more complex than I can absorb for this thing as I am still at the 'blinky' stage, but I am pretty sure I can take it from here.
It would be good to know how to fix the 'No USB FET' issue but in the meantime I will be
- building a blinky for TMS320 ... the simplest possible thing
- trying out hardware debug under mspdebug within Eclipse for ez430
- trying to build and load the blinky above from cmdline
Honestly it is a shame that the startup effort is so high for TMS320 + Linux as the product is really nice. I don't know where Energia has gotten snagged on C2000 as that gave me real confidence with my MSP430G2 lpad. True, that was under OS X and seemed to have some issues for Linux but it was enough to get started.