Opera unite as a daemon

Question

Is it possible to run an opera unite server without the browser?

Say for instance I want to use my always-on FreeBSD server, which doesn't run X.

Answer 1

It actually needs a running X to draw the widgets: unless the application has an option to be ran as a daemon or something, there's no straight way.

But let's think: if we can redirect its display socket via SSH, maybe, we can accept all X requests and just do nothing? YES! Here's the receipt:

First, you'll need to ssh -X user@server opera from a remote machine to setup opera via GUI to have it running. Done? Ok, close it then.

Now you can fool it to think X is running: Xvfb - a "fake X server" - is made for this kind of thing: it emulates a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory. There's a script xvfb-run in the xorg-server package that makes it easy. Note that you still have to install the X server to get Xvfb (unless there's a separate port out there).

Cheers!