Confirmed under Debian Unstable AMD64. There's no error output I could see but as an immediate solution I found out that the official 32-bit build for linux from blender.org works fine. All 64-bit builds I've run including my own subversion checkouts have the same problem, also had someone else check under a different 64-bit distro where the problem wasn't present.
- Bug#445146: sculp mode not working Benjamin Green
- Bug#445146: [Pkg-blender-maintainers] Bug#445146: scu... Cyril Brulebois