guy@guy-desktop:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 315292 307696 7596 0 10588 81676
-/+ buffers/cache: 215432 99860
Swap: 923696 185208 738488
When I installed Ubuntu, I let it reformat the 60GB hdd and set up the spaces itself (w/o my intervention)
I suppose that the failure to allocate trigged a swap, freed some ram which finally allowed the allocation after what it stopped displaying the failure message and did run winecfg
