As far as I know, there is no other limitations than the 2 hours limit. The demo mode should be plenty enough for testing purposes. Regarding instances. In the device tree, 1 master = 1 instance, no matter how many slaves the master is communicating with. But it is also possible that your Codesys runtime act as a slave. In this case, each slave in the device tree is one instance. You can also use the license metric tool in the IDE. This will tell you exactly how many instances you have in your project....
I don't have time to go through the whole manual but as I said earlier, the servo drive does not support any of the modes needed for SoftMotion Light to work. If you want to use the full SoftMotion, you could use SMC_Homing function block to do the homing. This function block does not use the Homing Mode. It still uses the CSP mode and does the logic in Codesys runtime instead of in the servo drive. Read the documentation about it to see if it fits your needs. But if your controller only supports...
In order to use SoftMotion Light, a servo drive needs to support CiA 402 operating modes: Profile Position (PP), Profile Velocity (PV) and Homing Mode (HM). https://content.helpme-codesys.com/en/CODESYS%20SoftMotion%20Light/_sm_light_requirements.html According to the Lenze i950 documentation you linked in your post, none of these modes are supported. Not even Homing Mode which explains why MC_Home does not work even with the full SoftMotion. The full SoftMotion uses Cyclic Synchronous Position Mode...
You can still start Codesys as administrator as a workaroud.
Put %f in the "text" field and rValue in the "Text variable" field. You could also have a look at the possible placeholders: https://content.helpme-codesys.com/en/CODESYS%20Visualization/_visu_placeholder_with_formatting_sequence_in_a_string.html
I would definitely try using the "Reconfigure" function block from "CAA Device Diagnosis@ library. https://content.helpme-codesys.com/en/libs/CAA%20Device%20Diagnosis/3.5.17.0/CAA-Device-Diagnosis/Function-Blocks/Reconfigure/Reconfigure.html#:~:text=This%20function%20block%20reads%20and,take%20effect. Although I have not tried it with Modbus, I had great success with EtherNet/IP, Profinet and EtherCAT. You can also have a look at the other functions in this library. There are useful functions to...
I have been running Codesys IDE in VirtualBox on a Linux Mint host for many many years without issues. I use it every day and it works great. I wouldn't mess around with wine. Would probably just be a waste of time. Codesys Go might be the future of PLC programming on Linux! Can't wait to test it.
Not sure this will help you but I had the same issue and was able to activate the license on a Windows PC using the Web Depot in a web browser. https://content.helpme-codesys.com/en/CODESYS%20Development%20System/_cds_installing_license.html