Thanks for the links to those tools :). Some I had heard of before, others I had not.
This was basically a little way for learn some C by doing a real-world project. I really only had experience coding on Unix platforms (Linux specifically), and I wanted to be able to run the code on the Ubuntu laptop at the lab.
It’s a little annoying to run this in a VM, yes, but it’s my fault for not running Linux as a main OS, or a second OS. I rely on too many Windows things. That said though once you have the dongle plugged into Windows and recognized by VMWare, it becomes a native device recognized by Linux, and the process from there is the exact same as if you were running it from a native Linux machine.