Surprisingly, the Squeeze CD I downloaded today had GNOME on it. Thinking I’ll be able to remove it, I installed it. It was useless, except the fact that it fixed my framebuffer 
, so I tried removing it.
Well, after a few unsuccessful attempts, I found a command that removes all of GNOME:
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge gnome*
Isn’t that sweet? 
Tell me if it helped you down in the comment section.
akensai
/ January 23, 2012I made the same mistake, did the autoinstall and what do you know? Gnome is installed on my new webserver. Funny thing is I didnt even notice until after I had my entire webserver environment setup, was wondering what was eating so much CPU (no monitor, remote only). After trying to remove gnome with aptitude I found that it broke everything else, so the only option is to disable for me, that or move my entire webhost to a different machine so I can install without desktop. Fail.
edbroges
/ November 2, 2011Thank’s, your removal command made my night. I was in a situation where I had a small hard drive failure which I replaced and downloaded the first dvd because I had no blank cd’s, yes I am so deficient. Its been a while since I’ve seen gnome so I thought what the hell maybe things have changed?. Maybe the gnome dev’s have created a desktop users can configure and control the way they like! No, instead they have created a desktop that dev’s can show off and filled it with useless programs that no one uses, programs you can’t remove unless you purge the desktop. So after installing someone else’s desktop I installed “My Friggin Desktop” and did a quick oogle on how to completely remove someone else’s and whata u know I found myself here so if I have expressed myself elite style with full contempt let me just say loudly THANK YOU!
Dan
/ September 5, 2010First of all, it is not surprising that your Squeeze CD had GNOME on it, as it is the default desktop environment of Debian.
Second: of course there is NetworkManager in Debian, it just may not be installed by default as part of GNOME.
Andy C.
/ September 5, 2010For me it was surprising, since the previous Squeeze CD I downloaded only listed the base system and SSH server as package sets. My mistake was trying to replace GNOME with IceWM and install NetworkManager afterwards. DeviceKit, DBus or whatever probably failed to run.
Andy C.
/ September 4, 2010I only installed GNOME because I thought NetworkManager might be there.
It wasn’t, so I looked for a method to remove it. And I posted it here
KDE User
/ September 4, 2010It is far more effective installing Debian without a desktop environment.
Then you can install a pure gnomeless Debian installation with a desktop.