Novell to acquire Suse

[Dan Coutu]

Michael ODonnell wrote:

>>The biggest burr in my butt so far has been trying to get
>>the systems so that I can use X applications (like xemacs) on
>>the servers that display back to my desktop via an SSH tunnel.
>>The servers do not have X installed on them because they're not
>>workstations.  But it sure would be nice to be able to start X
>>applications there and display them on my X server.
>>
>>Perhaps I'm just encountering a severe shortage of information,
>>knowledge, or both.  Given that I've been working with UNIX systems
>>for over 15 years the knowledge shortfall would have to be something
>>specific to Debian though.
>>    
>>
>
>
>It's certainly possible that you can legitimately
>ascribe your problems to Debian.  Another explanation
>might be that you've overlooked something that's
>applicable to *any* situation involving X.  Would you
>care to tell us what you've done so far in your
>attempts to get those X clients to use the remote
>(desktop) displays?  Somebody here might be able to
>help you, and in any case such an exchange in a forum
>like this might be interesting to others, as well.
>
>Just for starters (for example) have you verified that
>the X servers on the desktop boxes don't have their
>"nolisten" options selected, via either their command
>lines or their config files?  The servers won't even
>be willing to consider inbound connection attempts
>from external hosts unless instructed that it's OK...
>  
>
Well, I have had no problem with this when interacting with other flavors of
Linux or even FreeBSD. So I'm certain it is not my local system that's 
the problem.

I'm using ssh to connect remotely like this:

ssh -XCA -l mylogin remote.system.name

It is only Debian (3.0) server systems that do not define a DISPLAY 
environment variable
on the remote end (ssh normally does this automatically when you use the 
switches I've
specified above) and so X applications will not display on my local 
system's X server.

I tried Cole's suggestion of installing xbase-clients but that didn't do 
it. I had been thinking
that perhaps I needed to start with a remote environment that already 
had a valid DISPLAY
defined because it was a workstation. Can anyone verify or deny this theory?

Thanks,

Dan