Status: Linux running R3 - message in a bottle

It's funny how we get in these binds...

In January, we opened-up RebDev (DevBase chat) with our latest R3 release, had a burst of new user accounts, only to find that the server could not handle the Unicoded names. Boom. For now, we've limited chat to the existing accounts, while we get it figured out.

The root of the problem is that our servers are Linux, and there's no R3 yet running on Linux, hence no support for Unicode, hence the RebDev server chokes on UTF-8 encoded strings containing non-ASCII that are sent from the R3 client.

Anyway, that was motivation enough to take a short timeout and evaluate the R3 situation on Linux.

But, some good news! With a bit of work, an R3 has been built on Fedora Linux, and it runs well enough to bring up CHAT (so tcp, http, file handling, etc.) and send a message to the group. It felt a bit like sending a message in a bottle or from some other multiverse. Kind of exciting really. (But, I'm probably the only one in the REBOL domain that uses Fedora, so that bin probably won't work for your box.)

Here's what I want to to do:

Tell me what Linux you want as the "standard". Yes, I know, I've asked it before, but this time I'm serious, and we'll obtain a CPU and get it online for builds. I think a lot of you are keen on Ubuntu, no?

Also, since the Linux build is essentially Posix, it may be fairly close to building on Apple OS-X. That would be kind of nice, do you think? (But, keep in mind these are core builds mainly for backend usage, so no graphics at this time.)

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