Let's say you want to run a Processing sketch on a server. Like maybe you want to generate several million PDF and JPEG images using a handful of Amazon EC2 instances.
This is called “headless” mode, and to do so, it's necessary to install what's known as a virtual frame buffer.
On Ubuntu 14.04, these are the things you need to install first:
sudo apt-get install xvfb libxrender1 libxtst6 libxi6