I had already taken care of all of them.
The issue is when you have a minimally setup host, one that does not run X-Windows on the console. There is some critical utility (xauth maybe) that is not installed, which means even when everything else it setup, it still does not setup a DISPLAY variable or a tunnel back for the xwindows ession.
After I shotgunned the following, it worked:
apt-get install x-window-system-core xfs xserver
But I'd prefer to get the minimal working stuff for my "utility" instances.