I know that is a strange question, I am just curious.
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Please review the FAQ - Server Fault is for professionals seeking advice on actual problems they face in their work environments -- SuperUser and [Unix & Linux](http//unix.stackexchange.com) cater to enthusiasts, home users, and "just curious" type questions...– voretaq7Aug 25, 2012 at 1:22
2 Answers
Yes. Individual X clients (which all Gnome and KDE applications and the window managers themselves are) can simply have display output (and mouse/keyboard input) redirected to an X window server. I regularly start an X windows server (XMing actually) on my Windows 7 laptop and start clients from SSH terminal sessions to display on the laptop. The key is usually simply to define $DISPLAY to point to the X server machine.
Going further, you can use XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol) to redirect the entire session, starting at login, from a remote host to the local X server. In this case, you can have a workstation running the X server software which provides access to multiple hosts running the actual sessions with X clients. This used to be more common when the workstation was much less powerful than the server but had good graphics.
In most client/server setups, which the X Window System is, the client is local and the server is remote; in X, this is reversed, because what is being 'served' is display capability, so the X server is running the display in front of you and the X client can be anywhere.
The "Live" installers mostly do this out of the box (so to speak).
For DVD installers, that depends on the distro but to my understanding they're all running in a restricted xwindows environment so such capabilities are highly unlikely to be present.
The CD installers almost definitely would not.
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CD installers are (or should be) able to run a desktop environment, but it's possible since things have bloated over the years some or many distros removed that functionality. Knoppix will for sure: knoppix.org– aseqAug 8, 2012 at 23:23