I never looked at its sources; it sounds quite broken.
I wouldn't call it broken. Having it build and run in spite of the endian issues is actually a good thing - it shows that programs that fail because of assumptions about endianness are inherently broken. And you don't need to look at the sources ;)
http://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/hint.html"If you like living on the edge you can try building the emulator on a big endian machine, and you will get an emulation of a big endian 8086, a rather bizarre and somewhat useless beast. For everyone else, please run the emulator on a little endian machine."
Regarding hexchat, does it work with a remote X server?Yes. At least the server selection window, which crashes on the Amiga X server, does. I tried connecting to a server, but then hexchat blew up with "memory fault". Not sure what that means (out of memory?). 64MB might not cut it; I ordered a 128MB stick a while ago, but it might still take weeks to arrive.
How much swap do you have? And have you unlimit / ulimit before launching to see if it changes the results?
John