Ok, well, there was no swap space at all. I kind of relied on my ubuntu to manage this on it's own, but perhaps that's not the best strategy. So I established swap file of 1GB and now things run much smoother. So I could install the HL2, and even launch it, but when it starts loading that blurry start menu, it crashes at some point, and throws me out to the desktop, at lousy 800x600 resolution. Is there any way how to diagnose the cause of this crash? Perhaps I can run the execution command in console and then check the console log?
