Running Growl without a user logged into a graphical session? I currently have an OS X server (running 10.8.2) that has irssi installed, and is set up to send Growl notifications to my laptop when I am mentioned or have received a private message on IRC. However, Growl only appears to have options to start when a graphical login is done: trying to run it in a terminal over SSH gives:

$ /Applications/Growl.app/Contents/MacOS/Growl 
_RegisterApplication(), FAILED TO establish the default connection to the WindowServer, _CGSDefaultConnection() is NULL.


Running it as a launchd daemon also doesn't seem to work, as I can't use growlnotify to create a notification.

It runs normally when started as a login item or via the Finder, but this is unideal for a server machine, where I only want to login via SSH.
You could try sending growl notifications via the network protocol instead of routing them through the Growl app.  e.g. send the notifications to your laptop using a python script 

http://pythonhosted.org/gntp/