Running out of memory?

[Eamonn Sullivan]

I use Warty on a home built machine. Just out of curiosity and to
recheck my configuration after upgrading my ram to 1 gigabyte, I
recompiled the latest kernel (which I haven't done since the late
1990s). It doesn't complete. I get:

Out of memory: Killed process 17498 (apache2)

Then it goes on to kill four other apache2 instances, then gdmgreeter,
then bash. I was running  make -j bzImage in a pty.

I find this hard to believe. As mentioned earlier, I have a gigabyte
of RAM, 2 gigabytes of swap (which free reports gets little use). I'm
running on a very recent Intel motherboard (D865GLC) with a 2.4 GHz
Celeron. I've seen other people on this list say they've compiled
thier own custom kernel. This is the output of free:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1019576     609828     409748          0     162148     126804
-/+ buffers/cache:     320876     698700
Swap:      2047744      29388    2018356

Am I doing anything wrong, or do I just need to boot in single-user
mode to recompile the kernel?