When trying to compile Civ: CTP for Sparc/Linux, ld died with a 200MB core file. There is a lot of big object files in this project, so maybe ld can't handle that much on Sparc.
Make sure that everything that you are linking with was compiled with -fPIC. On sparc there is also a -fpic, but that will fail when your link is too large ...
I'm not sure -fpic rather than -fPIC would explain this (if that is the problem, ld is supposed to give an error that the global offset table filled up, at least according to the GCC manual). Make sure you have lots of virtual memory (while running out of data space should produce something more like "out of memory", running out of stack space will produce a sig11). Make sure that ulimit is set to allow enough stack space (see "man bash" re ulimit). If those don't help, I'm not sure we can do much more to help.
I talked with a few of the Loki guys at LinuxWorld and they say that the problem was indeed that they didn't have enough swap space.