i'm seeing the same behavior (oom-killer invoked) on a machine with 256MiB of RAM if no swap is loaded.
without swap, the following command fails because of gconf's postinst script, which calls gconf-schemas --register-all --no-signal: aptitude install gnome-desktop if i add a bunch of swap, i can get away with it. It would be a shame to have to give up on gnome for systems with 256MiB RAM and no swap :( --dkg
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