Howdy, does anyone know if there is a way to run an app like KTorrent exclusively from the command line for use on a headless file server?

Right now, my only alternative is bitTornado and without many of the newer features standard in clients like KTorrent, Azureus, and uTorrent, it is really showing it's age.

Would it be possible to compile kTorrent without a gui or perhaps run it in a dummy X server?

This is not possible with the current codebase.

If you want to run something on a headless box, I'd suggest you to try rtorrent, ctorrent (or its enhanced version) or XBT (it even seems to support PEX). It's also possible to run Azureus in a console mode.