Hello, 
After some debugging and troubleshooting with Shehzan we have figured out that my system had X running at boot for some reason. The solution is to kill it and then the procedure would work as outlined above. 

1. Check if X is running
$ps aux | grep X 


my system produced: 
"root      1945  0.1  0.1 212380 51960 tty7     Ss+  14:23   0:04 /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch"

2. If you get a similar output, kill X: 
$sudo service lightdm stop

3. Check if X is still running  
$ps aux | grep X




4. start local X
$/usr/bin/X :0 &amp;


5. check the configuration 
$env DISPLAY=:0 glewinfo | less


Note the first time step 5 is ran from any SSH session it would be instant, subsequent calls will be much slower (~ 1.5 minutes for the info to show up.) Not sure why...