I'm interested to benchmark a console-mode application, and would like to reduce to a minimum any interferences from other processes in the system.

Is there an easy way to boot into Ubuntu 12.04 in a "bare-metal" mode ? I'm still interested in casually booting a "desktop" version of Ubuntu (so will prefer to avoid permanent changes), and would like to avoid installing a separate Ubuntu-server version.

My use-case is the following -

1. Application is single-thread and console-mode only.
2. Test-box has 12GB of memory.
3. I ssh into the test-box.

Seems I can skip at least Unity, X-server and their dependents.