I setup my server without any xserver and ran it like that happily for a few months until I needed to do a lot of file transfers (backups) from the server’s hard drive to my USB drive.
For that job (which I do usually every week) I found it easier to use a GUI file manager so I installed KDE4.
I was surprised to find that it really didn’t take much disk space (sorry forgotten the exact figure).
I don’t start it automatically, so it’s not using resources when I don’t need it, and it has no negative effect on my server and is there when I need it.
As for remote admin, I use SSH for almost everything, you can get a free copy of putty for using under a Windows client if you want, and can run yast over that.
There is also a way of running remote X apps through SSH on a Windows client (they run normally from a Linux client) if that’s what you want, as long as you have the xserver stuff installed on your server (another reason I wanted to install a GUI on my server).
You you can simply login to your server through an ssh connection (that allows remoteX) and run almost anything on the server over the remote connection, ie dolphin/Yast2(GUI version)/gkrellm, whatever :).
I just thought I’d mention that as an alternative to using Webmin.
I’ve played with LXDE a bit in other distros (Debian, etc.) and so far I like it quite a bit. I was exploring openSuSE 11.2 inside Virtualbox last night and while the KDE desktop was goreous, it was rather slow (even for a virtual machine that granted I didn’t allocate a whole lot of resources to). I did a ‘one-click’ install of the LXDE meta-package and then logged out and logged back in using LXDE instead. There was a very noticeable difference in the responsiveness of the virtual machine, even with all the KDE baggage still installed. It was actually fairly pleasant in full-screen mode.
I’m kind of tempted to try something along the lines of a no-gui or minimal X install and add LXDE afterwards, and do any system admin either from the command line or from YaST-curses (the other thing I was experimenting with last night on a virtual machine). That way the machine should be nice and for doing server stuff most of the time, and I can pop into a minimal (but not painful) desktop environ when I want to use the machine myself. Again, I’ll probably ‘mock-up’ everything in Virtualbox, including the main system drive and the two storage drives in software RAID 1 config so I have a chance to work it all out before doing surgery on the ‘real’ thing.
Yeah, I actually did the same thing and tried LXDE before eventually installing KDE4 as well. It’s a real pain in the rear to install LXDE as ther is no “meta package” as far as I found, so you have to install all other kinds of dependent packages.
Once again, I don’t have a list :(.
The other thing you will need is the start script for startx to work, you have to add -
exec ck-launch-session startlxde
to ~/.xinitrc, otherwise it won’t even start.
This was all several months ago though, and also under openSUSE 11.1, maybe it’s all fixed now ;).
I would suggest WindowMaker or Enlightment as fallback GUIs for a server. Both are very small (smaller than LXDE/KDE/GNOME/etc) are faster and are more than enough for a server
