I know that you don’t need a GUI op a server but sometimes you are in a small business environment where the people having to use it are not that familiar with a terminal. If you install ubuntu-desktop you overkill it by installing all user software packages like office, some games,gimp, etc which of course will also take ages. The following will set us a basic gui quickly.

sudo aptitude install --without-recommends ubuntu-desktop

• open-source