Can confirm, the SSH thing saved me many times. I'm running Arch (btw), so as it turned out it did not have a working sshd by default, nor any swap enabled. I very quickly ran into issues where not even oom killer could save it. Once I figured these out though it was smooth sailing.
Lesson of the story: Don't try to compile firefox from source without swap...
I had Firefly (lame) and Piranha (okay).
My friend Marc had all of them as well.