1) Yes
2) I don't particularly like any IDE, but I hear good things about Anjuta and kDevelop.
3) I've never read them, but some people I work with love them.
4)
The CPlus CPlus Network is a good place to start.
5) I suppose in theory you could do that... but any program that uses a syscall isn't going to neccesarily work the same... check out QT if your looking for a cross platform C++ toolkit.