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The compiler and remote access are really two separate issues. What you want is an operating system which will allow Secure Shell access (the sshd that Thelenian mentions). Just about any flavor of free Un*x will allow this. Red Hat is a good choice. There are many other distros of Linux which you can get: Debian, Slackware and SuSe just to name a few of the better known and well established. You can also try, FreeBSD, although I'm a Linux promoter.
There are a couple of freeware compilers and dev environments for Windoze systems which would allow you to compile a mud, Cygwin and DJGPP are the most popular. These are kludges at best, attempting to port Un*x tools and operating environment onto a Microsoft platform.
Almost all mud servers are developed on a POSIX system and depend on having the tools available to them from compilers and make progrmas clear down to the bash shell (command line interpreter).
One nice thing about one of the free Unices is that they are far less greedy for resources so you can run one on a system which is a few years old quite happily. You could even bring it up in a mode without the graphical desktop which is unneccessary for running a mud.
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