8034 software RIS 2.0 - how to work it under Ubuntu 14.04?
Just to close the circle (and not just hide this info in the comments), I don't have high hopes this will ever work satisfactorily. At least without not a fair amount of hacking.

As per WineHQ, USB support in Wine is weak at best, and so BricxCC via Wine is probably a non-starter, as well, for the same reason.

You might have better luck with a COM port based tower. These can be had from eBay rather cheaply. Wine has documentation about presenting serial ports in Linux or OS X to COM ports in Wine.

Many of those USB serial dongle/cables that use FTDi chips can be used in Wine, as these can be used as COM ports (using the same facility I mentioned above) but the Lego USB tower is a special device that doesn't abstract well; it uses a very custom protocol above a thin USB layer.

Or you can switch to a less pretty IDE based solution like NQC or LeJOS that runs natively on Linux. The USB tower works reasonably well using native Linux enumerations and comms. It's a very simple half-duplex medium speed protocol with simple error checking and (AFAIR) no flow control.