PicStart Plus and PIC16F1936

Hello,

For a small project here at home I ordered some PIC16F1936, thinking 
that my good-old-upgraded PICStart Plus would be able to program it.

Since picp did not support it out of the box, I tried to program it with 
MPLAB 8.50. But it seems that the MPLAB + PICStart Plus combination does 
not support this device either...


My questions:

- Is there a technical reason why the PICStart Plus is not able to 
program a PIC16F1936? (programming voltage or other...)

- If not, is it possible to reconstruct the configuration information 
for this PIC in picp? Long ago I did capture the MPLAB config through 
the serial port for a 16F628 or a 16F628A. The Y cable should be somewhere.

- Should I simply let myself go on the dark side and buy a pickit?

- Is the pickit 3 about to be supported in Linux, either natively or 
through Wine, mainly for the programmation of the device?


Thanks,

Maxime Larocque