Tracking down the issue, I've cleared the library:
rm -rf "/home/rstudio-user/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.5/*"
And relaunched the installation from scratch.
It seems that in total, 3 packages trigger the "Killed" error.
The downloaded source packages are in
‘/tmp/Rtmp4d7qhL/downloaded_packages’
installation path not writeable, unable to update packages: class, codetools, mgcv
Warning messages:
1: In install.packages(pkgs = doing, lib = lib, repos = repos, ...) :
installation of package ‘SummarizedExperiment’ had non-zero exit status
2: In install.packages(pkgs = doing, lib = lib, repos = repos, ...) :
installation of package ‘SingleCellExperiment’ had non-zero exit status
3: In install.packages(pkgs = doing, lib = lib, repos = repos, ...) :
installation of package ‘iSEE’ had non-zero exit status
In particular, SummarizedExperiment is described here, but didn't get a reply: Bioconductor Package Installtion Fails With Writeability Error
This is to addition to the warning message:
installation path not writeable, unable to update packages: class, codetools, mgcv
However, that one I know how to get around using:
install.packages(c("class", "codetools", "mgcv"), lib=.libPaths()[1])