A while ago I bought a PICkit2 programmer, including 16f690 PIC. I installed piklab and sdcc (in Debian repositories) and got it working pretty easily. I did play with the programmer that came with it (mplab, windows only), which upgraded my firmware. piklab cannot use the new firmware, so if you need to get an old firmware, then try the old firmware downloads page
There is quite a difference in programming between mplab and piklab. Although there is support for a large number of chips in piklab, they are not supported as well as mplab. The big problem is that in mplab most special bits (i.e. each bit for an output port, one per pin) have a defined name so you can set them on or off individually. Piklab on the other hand has support for only a few of these, so if you want to turn on a pin, you have to set a value on the whole port (byte). Saying that, I prefer the piklab editor as it seems to do a better job with syntax highlighting etc.
Below is some code examples to help you get started if you are finding the learning curve steep
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