I would like to have a headless machine run steam without having a monitor, mouse or keyboard attached to it and have it use the dedicated GPU (a GTX 970) to stream games over the network.
I have found this tutorial on the steam website but the problem is that whenever I try to execute startxfce4
over the SSH connection it instead launches xfce4 on my local machine replacing/messing up my own desktop environment.
What I gathered is that I have to create a virtual monitor that can run gpu accelerated applications without actually having to attach a physical monitor but so far I've failed to do so. Someone actually already asked the same thing but when I tried that method I get an error stating that there are no monitors attached and it fails.
Does anyone know of a guide where someone tried to do the same thing? I also cannot figure out how to e.g. execute something like startxfce4 so it launches in its own window. The problem with that is also that it needs to run even while the ssh connection is closed, so I probably need to set up a vnc server or something but it seems that whenever I try to start the vnc server and then remove the monitor I cannot start any games from Steam anymore since it hangs. Sometimes the vnc server stops responding.