installing gnome in an OpenVZ container -- /dev/mem: Permission denied
 

I'm having copious problems trying to put gnome on an OpenVZ-debian 5.0 container. First attempt:
An ANSI screen appears with a progress bar. Progress bar hangs at 0%, and it appears nothing happens. So I kill everything and start over. Distrusting tasksel, I then tried this instead:
Terminated with errors, apparently due to conflicts with undead tasksel operation (which locked aptitude). Kill -9 didn't work, so I rebooted. Decided to try the tasksel approach again:
The ANSI status bar immediately started advancing. But it eventually crashed with "tasksel: aptitude failed (255)". Tasksel seems to have trashed my nameserver settings. I'm not sure of the proper way to configure the nameservers in debian, so I just hacked the /etc/resolv.conf so I could move forward. With the network operational (at least temporarily), I again ran:
The progress bar completed, but again has an unhappy ending: "tasksel: aptitude failed (255)". I thought it merely trashed my nameserver config again, but no, this time resolv.conf is how I left it, and DNS works.

I should add that just before the ANSI progress bar appears, I see this output in the CLI:
But that does not stop tasksel from pressing on, so I'm not sure if /dev/mem is essential to gnome.

Has anyone successfully installed gnome in an openvz container?

OpenVZ
 

Frankly, I have never WANTED GNOME in a container.
I have installed fluxbox and xfce, then accessed desktops using VNC and XRDP, but never GNOME.

You have aroused my curiosity, however.

Have you checked the OpenVZ documentation, forums, and WIKI pages?
Someone, somewhere, has attempted to do and document almost EVERYTHING in a container, even if it was totally unreasonable to expect it to WORK in a container.