Not sure if applicable, since it's more of a band-aid solution instead of actually getting the linux server files working natively, but...
Running Ubuntu 10.04, had the same segfault issues as you did with a truncated core, with no help from the internets. What I did to get it working was setup the server in Windows to get the directory structure correctly in place, and then moved the whole folder to my linux box and am running it with WINE.