I was able to recover a Gnome installation with the following:
* Reboot to the broken installation, and SSH in.
* Install scrollkeeper (probably unnecessary). This forced removal of rarian and a lot of Gnome.
* Purge all of scrollkeeper (aptitude purge ...).
* Install rarian-compat.
* Install ubuntu-desktop. Can take a while.
I was able to recover a Gnome installation with the following:
* Reboot to the broken installation, and SSH in.
* Install scrollkeeper (probably unnecessary). This forced removal of rarian and a lot of Gnome.
* Purge all of scrollkeeper (aptitude purge ...).
* Install rarian-compat.
* Install ubuntu-desktop. Can take a while.