@ryan: sorry for not making my issue clearer (I was frustrated because I thought I'd found a solution). I'm working on an "old" laptop that only has a half a gig of memory. The latest ubuntu distro will run for a couple of hours and then I have to reboot due to a memory leak making my laptop unusable. So, I'm looking for a distro with a smaller footprint. I've followed the steps that you describe but making the gnome session "look" like the netbook session still has the problem of using too much memory.
@ryan: sorry for not making my issue clearer (I was frustrated because I thought I'd found a solution). I'm working on an "old" laptop that only has a half a gig of memory. The latest ubuntu distro will run for a couple of hours and then I have to reboot due to a memory leak making my laptop unusable. So, I'm looking for a distro with a smaller footprint. I've followed the steps that you describe but making the gnome session "look" like the netbook session still has the problem of using too much memory.