i do not know the excat cause of your problem. Do you get any respose from the renderer at all?
if you type Render -h in the shell does the renderer launch?
segmentation faults ussually happen when the application competely craps out. How much RAM do you have in the Linux box?
try a real simple scene like a moving sphere with one light. some thing that should render without question.
This is only to troubleshoot the Linux render works very well on complex scenes.
Make sure the Linux box has access and privilages to read and write to the maya project you set. Linux pays attention to permissions, which bites me sometimes because I create a project on one machine and try to render on the linux box which doesn't have priviliges.
Here is the workflow we use for the Linux renderer. We have a RAID drive connected to a Linux box. That drive is NFS mounted on all the production machines. On a production machine we create a Maya project directory on that RAID. That way all the project files are on the Linux box but act as local files to the production machines.
Then when we render here is the command we use. First we rlogin into the Linux box. Then cd to the RAID/myproject/scenes.
Then when you are inside the scene directory for your project, execute the command:
Render -n 0 -s # -e # -proj /RAID/myproject/images nameofscene
That workflow has always worked, on both Linux renderer 2.5 and 3.0. If your production machines are NT then I would recommend getting a Unix command in dos utility. There a couple on this site. They will be very helpful in communicating with your Linux box.
I hope it helps. I am sorry i could not answer you question totally.