Wait, what? How do you run VNC without a desktop or anything installed? What does VNC render if there's no desktop to show? I think there's obviously a piece of this pie I'm missing...
I may come across as a newbie, but I've been using VNC for years (admittedly mainly in a Windows environment), and have a fairly basic idea of X (had to learn about it to understand how Xming worked) but I have no idea how VNC could work without some kind of desktop running on the server to show to the client. If you can educate me, then I would really appreciate the lesson
That's fine until you have to reboot and X refuses to start because there's no monitor attached, then you have to faff about making a VGA nully-thingy with resistors.
It still boils down to the fact that a back-end should not need a GUI in order to be configured. Imagine if you couldn't configure Apache without a GUI, or MySQL?
Hackers of the world, unite!