If you consider the overhead of installing a modern desktop/windowing system such as Gnome or KDE, it could easily more than double the data size footprint of a Linux server. That last point may seem moot today, but with many environments deploying hundreds of virtual machines, 200-400MB of extra space per VM can really add up quickly (see my latest presentation on Open Source Data Deduplication for more ideas on saving space in these environments). The problem is that most system administrators do not install X11, Xorg, or other GUI interfaces on Linux and Unix systems as this introduces more packages to manage and patch, more security bugs to fix/mitigate, and a larger install footprint (more used space). I’m writing this post as a quick reference when I field this question in the future, and I hope it helps you, too.
One of my most feared questions from end users is “how can I interact with an X11 GUI application on our remote Linux system if I have no access to the physical console, X11 isn’t installed, and there is no VNC access?” After hearing this many times at one site, I wrote a script to automate the server side process, but even that does not address the whole story. Xeyes displayed from a remote server via Xming on Windows, over ssh, with a PuTTY window in the background
