Adding GNOME to Ubuntu Server

I needed to add in an Xserver to my Ubuntu Server--Oracle 11g installer is graphical. I didn't want to play the redirecting of the X display back to OS X, so I did some searching and found this discussion. I'll reproduce the steps that I took. The forum posting has many different solutions.

Update your package system.

sudo apt-get update

Install the Ubuntu desktop package. This package seems to be a super package containing many package dependencies. It literally downloaded about 1.7 GB of software. Gdm is part of this install, so you don't have to do an individual install of that after the fact.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Gdm automatically starts the X system during bootup. To configure it to start, do the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

You may need to reconfigure your video card, keyboard, etc. To do so, do the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg