http://dev.gentoo.org/~gustavoz/hal-debug.txt hal-0.5.9 is broken for sparc at the moment. We're working with cardoe on this, it's just a tracker bug so users know how's it going. Workaround for sparc users who want gnome 2.18: remove hald from use in /etc/init.d/xdm - gnome will work, though you won't get the fancy hal toys working of course.
Fixed in 0.5.9.1-r1.