vbnc will by default add many references, and apparently some of those are not installed by default on Ubuntu.
I do not know what you have to install to get System.Design.dll, but you can disable the default references by passing -noconfig:
vbnc -noconfig test.vb
Note that this will also disable a few other default features, most notably all the default imports will be disabled too.
So for instance this code:
Class Test
Shared Sub Main
Console.WriteLine ("Hello World")
End Sub
End Class
when compiled like this:
vbnc -noconfig test.vb
will fail with:
test.vb (3,21) : error VBNC30451: 'Console' is not declared. It may be inaccessible due to its protection level.
The fix is easy, just pass -imports: to vbnc
vbnc -noconfig test.vb -imports:System
and now it should compile just fine.