If you are looking for VB-easy on Linux, you are not going to find it. The good news is that you won't end up with VB-maintainability and VB-reliability, either. Properly developed, your application could be an order of magnitude more stable and reliable on Linux.
You should consider developing your logging application in a cross platform environment, for instance, use the Eclipse GUI and develop Java code targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac. Use the eclipse SWT (
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/) to build your GUI, and use MySQL (or PostgreSQL) for your database back end.
If you don't want to fight the Java learning curve, you could also develop a pretty sweet cross platform application with TCL/Tk, but you may not be excited by the performance and maintainability of that platform.
If you are stuck on Microsoft, you should look into the "Mono" platform, which will let you develop and run .Net applications, including GUI apps on Linux. Your karma will suffer from this, however.
Those are all free tools and free platforms that will even let your (hopefully) free software run on many platforms, including unFree (as in beer, and as in freedom) platform like Windows and Mac.
There is *plenty* of support for people developing on Linux. It's called Newsgroups, Forums, IRC, and just plain asking Google. O'Reilly and Associates publish a variety of books on development with all these tools.
Have fun,
Jeff
