all I know is that you should still be able to use jdbc-odbc bridge to connect  to your database, it is platform independent.

Please have a look at: www.hxtt.com It is an platform independent jdbc  driver and is not expensive (about 100$) (and good customer support) .Moreover, I have used it for a real mission-critical system and works fine.

Concentrate on unixODBC. You just need a MS-Access
driver for unixODBC to make the solution works (Almost
all Linux distributions have unixODBC included).

I done the task before for Microsoft SQL Server. It
was 8 years ago and I don't remember anything.