I'm having trouble getting a connection to HAL on scratchbox/Maemo5 SDK...

There is an example at http://www.share-linux.com/hal1.php (very similar to the one in the Maemo5 developer's guide).
When run, it fails at libhal_ctx_init with error message (null) on my scratchbox (x86 target) but works fine when compiled and run directly on the host ubuntu9.10.

The HAL daemon is supposed to work on the SDK, right? I even reinstalled scratchbox and the SDK (didn't help) after finding no search results about similar problems.
It seems that the daemon might have some trouble connecting to dbus... However, dbus itself seems to work as I am able to connect and send signals over it (to targets other than hal). Can anyone else get the above mentioned example to work or is it just me not mastering this?