Interesting.  Haven't figured out how to compile sgminer without the graphical environment, but once it's built, I can run it from console.  Most of the time.  

Been running sgminer-gm from console in ubuntu 14.04 w/fglrx for a while now.  No issues whether running from host machine or ssh.   Ubuntu 16.04 is kind of an enigma though.  Systemd is a horse of a different color.  Right now I'm using a suspenders + belt strategy, have graphical.target set as default, disabled lightdm.service, and backed it up by with grub_cmdline_linux=3 and -default=sytemd.unit=multi-user.target.  It's hit-or-miss.  Sometimes I can get it running, sometimes sgminer can't find my cards.  Oddly it seems to run better from the host machine than ssh, although I haven't been able to consistently reproduce that.  

Looking at my fglrx rig, everything seems more stable and easy to work with when I kick X to the curb.  No more hard crashes.  No crashes at all if I leave it alone.   If I go ahead with plans to put in 10 or 20 rigs, that's the way to go I think.  But, if I do put in a bunch of rigs, it'll be 470's.  So I guess I gotta figure systemd out at some point.  Or else kick that to the curb too, which is part of the appeal of Arch I guess.  I mean, a lot of the stuff that gives us trouble (display managers, desktops, etc, and I include systemd in that) is nice running on your laptop, but doesn't really have a place in a dedicated mining rig, and just interferes with the ability to set it up how you want.  That's the feeling I'm getting anyway, so far.

Anyway sgminer-gm is tight.  Be glad when everything else settles down.