Since the linux kernel supports the USB-I2C (the FDDI FT232 chip) in the kernel, having it show up as /dev/ttyUSB0 (usually), connecting to the SRF02 was easy. It seems that all the demo programs are for WINDOWS, so I've provided my port of them at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~knickels/capek/usb_i2c.tgz

The timing is still very non-realtime, but this set just prints stuff to the terminal (using buffered IO at that!). I can see the comm errors when the disk swaps or something. I'll try some timing tests later, but this gets at why I'm not liking Linux for robotics... nonpredictable latency.