[geek.de.nz]

There is no need to logon automatically. Services can be started at boot time without you being logged on. This should work in all distros. Automatic login is always a security risk and it wastes resources if you are not using it anyway.

Automatic startup scripts are specified in /etc/inittab (usually). From that file (and included ones) you can see what services are started in what runlevel.

Runlevels are usually stored under the /etc/rcX.d directories, where X is the runlevel number (0-6 in most unix systems). 0 being halt and 6 reset. You can define 1-5 yourself, but they are usually defined already. Usually there are comments in /etc/inittab that tell you what each runlevel is and which one is the default (id:2:initdefault: means runlevel 2 is default). For a detailed description: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HighQualit...OWTO/boot.html
(bookmark tldp.org ;-) ).

If you have no keyboard, the first thing you have to make sure is that you can login via ssh. This is installed by many distros as a default but not by all. If you can access the box initially with a keyboard (and maybe mouse), you can install ssh (and/or vnc).

I cannot give you a detailed howto. There are many already on the web. Just browse the howtos here and google for 'vnc howto' or similar.