After some upgrades of Ubuntu from 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04.2, I faced problems during apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade
I had to fix it up with apt-get upgrade -f , however the “fix” which was targetting a fix up to the apt-get dist-upgrade removed about 260 packages, among which were the grub boot loader , xorg-server and even gnome
As in order to fix the package mishap the apt-get update -f was my only possible solution I went by and confirmed that I would like to wipe out all the packages.
Logically afterwards it was required that I install my missing xorg-server and gnome in order to make the Ubuntu desktop work again.
Here is how:
ubuntu:~# apt-get update && apt-get xorg-server ubuntu-desktop
The ubuntu-desktop is a meta package which installs the GNOME environment.