I'm really interested in FreeNX. This could be the answer to my friend wanting to use a kvm switch on the server (which I disapprove of for my own silly reasons, the most being the fact that it costs money). From the main page:

NX is an exciting new technology for remote display. It provides near local speed application responsiveness over high latency, low bandwidth links.

What's even cooler is that this thing runs over SSH. From the Archwiki:

Once installed the server is effectively running and ready to go, you do not have to do anything manually. The only thing that must be running in order to connect is the sshd daemon.

In actual fact, if you check the process list (ps aux) you may not see the nxserver running even though it says it is. This is because the nxserver is actually started by logging into sshd as the special user 'nx'. This user has been set up to use the nxserver as its shell, much like a normal user has bash as the default shell.

Read that and tell me that's not awesome. You can't. You just can't.

As far as the server goes, my friend and I have hit a stumbling block in that the case we wanted to use isn't going to make the cut, mostly due to its lack of... anything. Sure there are standoffs to screw the motherboard into, but there's nowhere to mount the cd drive, harddrives, or powersupply. We may end up just using one of the cases from my spare computers, which I'm fairly sure are from the PIII era.