best way to run narwhal under linux [closed]

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I'm checking out narwhal. It seems pretty cool, and I'm particularly impressed with the tusk package management system. However, since narwhal runs under rhino, the usefulness of this command-line tool is impinged upon by the JVM's obscene startup times.

I'm aware of narwhal's ability to run under different engines, but it's unclear whether there is another usable option, preferably one which will work without a significant amount of configuration effort.

I've tried to get the narwhal-v8 package going, but it seems to be explicitly targeted at OSX: it's looking for the library as a .dylib file. I hacked the makefile to change that for .so, and also told it to build v8 for my 64-bit architecture. The next stumbling block down that road is the apparent mysterious absence of an iconv library in ubuntu. I'm working on sorting that one out, but all of these errors indicate the possible presence of a Doing It Wrong anti-pattern, so I thought it prudent to appeal to the greater wisdom of the groupmind.

Is it possible to use a faster engine than rhino for narwhal under linux? Alternatively, what sorts of hoops would I have to jump through to get it running under nailgun?

edit: I've gotten it working under nailgun. After being run a couple of times, the time to run narwhal --help dropped to about 10%. I'm going to have a go at making a narwhal engine that implements this in a portable way.