Can't ping to localhost

It seems that the default QTopia Linux installation does not respect
/etc/hosts file. Maybe this is an issue with glibc or BusyBox, but I can't
ping localhost. This seems to be prventing me from mounting, inside the
device, a remote NFS partition.

Can you confirm that? Is there a workaround for the problem?

It seems the it is not a problem of BusyBox, since I can't resolve the name
"localhost" from Konqueror either.