Bitcoin-qt using remote connection

[Borph]

When I install bitcoin under Ubuntu, I get bitcoin-qt (the GUI application) and bitcoind (headless). That's fine, and I can configure bitcoind responding to JSON commands.

With the right bitcoin.conf I can do stuff like "bitcoind getbalance" from a remote machine. So it works.

When I start bitcoin-qt, it seems to ignore the bitcoin.conf, it always seems to go locally (shows the local wallet.dat). Did I miss an option?