A "headless" Linux guest OS?

Hey, is anyone else out there thinking about installing Linux as a guest OS in a "headless" (i.e., non-graphical) application server configuration? I installed a typical Fedora Core 5 distribution without a problem, but now what I'm thinking of doing is choosing a distro that works well in a headless configuration, and accessing the guest OS solely through SSH and/or X11 over the host-only network. That way, I can just open up all of my apps directly on the OSX desktop. I really have no need for a desktop GUI given that OSX serves that purpose so well.

Can anyone here think of any obvious reasons why this would be a stupid thing to do?

And assuming that it is not, can anyone recommend a distribution that works particularly well in a headless configuration? What I'd be shooting for is the ability to take advantage of this approach to trim down the size of the distribution.

What would be wicked cool (IMO) is for this guest OS to use a network-mounted MacOS disk for my home directory. But first things first.

 

Pretty much any distribution should work fine, just edit the inittab to go to runlevel 3 when you boot up instead of 5 and X11 won't be started. You can then just hide the Parallels console window that boots up.

 

That's great to know, thanks. I suppose the challenge then it simply to trim down the installation to eliminate all of the desktop apps I really don't need. Not that this is strictly necessary, but I'd like to have as lean a Guest OS as possible.

 

Most distros do have a 'minimal' installtion option. If you choose to have no display manager the guest will start up without X. Recognize that if you want to access the Linux guest graphically, you will get the overhead of X anyway. To run X remotely then you will have to connect via SSH and have scripts in place that will start X.