Thanks, andresrcs, for the very reasonable suggestion. My Ubuntu workspace is actually a guest virtual VBox machine running under Windows 10. I found a method to add a swap file to my Ubuntu workspace, added a 4Gbyte swap file, confirmed that it was there, and tried again. The install failed at the same place, again with a comment that it couldn't allocate any more memory. That leads me to suspect that the install actually has some sort of endless loop that consumes as much memory as there is.
If you have any other suggestions, I should appreciate receiving them. In the meantime, I will contact the package maintainer to report the issue and see whether he has any suggestions.
Thanks again. Larry Hunsicker