I'm trying to give myself reasons to play with Linux more but I'm a full time windows/vmware admin so running it as my primary OS isn't really an option right now. I'm thinking of putting a VM up with ...

The more popular way is to use something called nx / freenx. It works over SSH and is like RDP or VNC. You get a full window of the remote computer or server. You need to run the server part on the ...