I think the crashing might be related to the server. I know that after the server was bought back up after being offline for an update, my client which was previously very stable crashed if I tried to walk anywhere, rotate the viewpoint, and so on. I also noticed the missing inventory and tria that others have discussed elsewhere.
So I updated my client via CVS and recompiled and now get the dreaded \"You are not running the correct version of planeshift for this server\" error.
My client reports a version of \"Planeshift Crystal Blue 0.3.007\"
Anyways, building from source is much the same regardless of linux distribution, the only differences is getting the prerequsite packages like curl, cvs, openal, jam etc installed, because you will probably want to use the packaging system that your distribution comes with - RPM in the case of FC3.
You should be able to get rpms of cvs and curl pretty easily, try using rpmfind to locate rpms for the other software components.
http://rpmfind.net