Captain, I'm giving her all she's got.

I need to use Linux specifically for one program my friend some asshole wrote.  The machine it's on has only 512 MB of RAM and just running the GUI on Ubuntu 10.4 LTS puts it 20%-30% into the swap file.

The quickest and surest way to free up the much needed RAM is to disable the gdm.  You can do this by renaming/breaking the script that init loads at boot time.

$ sudo mv /etc/init/gdm.conf /etc/init/gdm.broke
and reboot.

You may send me a check for the RAM you save.  Contact me for details.