How do I get an application to display on a "dummy monitor"?

I have a GTK program which I would like to run from a console in one of the virtual terminals (over SSH, and locally). Is there a way to get this application(or any other GTK application, for future reference) to display to a dummy monitor instead of erring about this?

Note that I do not want to use a CLI version--not all GTK programs have CLI versions.

Solution 1:

Is there a way to get this application ... to display to a dummy monitor ...

One word, literally: xvfb

NAME
       Xvfb - virtual framebuffer X server for X Version 11

DESCRIPTION
       Xvfb is an X server that can run on machines with no 
display hardware and no physical input devices.  It emulates
a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory.

The X community has found many other novel uses for Xvfb,
including ... providing an unobtrusive way to run 
applications that don't really need an X server but 
insist on having one anyway.