Xbee and linux

So I got a couple of Xbee from sparkfun (sku: WRL-08664) and they work great for 9600 bps comunication (I’ve gotten faster speeds too). However I’ve growen past that and I need more(I’m looking at the adc mainly, but also a reset line for my RC tank would be cool). A little research says use X-CTU. I am a linux user and whall it runs in wine it does not see these xbee’s properly. A little expermenting reveals these also don’t work in windows. Apperatly they are out of date products (digi said so), and they have no plans to add support. I am aware that I can configure them via serial conection (+++ ATIDxxxx etc…) but I am having a hard time finding good documation (It seems that not all features are supported this way, please prove me wrong). I was hoping another sparkfun customer could point me to some good documantion or better yet a linux equivalent (python maybe) of X-CTU. If I could find documantion on the protocol I would be happy to write and release a linux(python) equivalent under the gpl or bsd lisence. Thanks guys!