X with ssh, (was Novell to acquire Suse)

[Dan Coutu]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 08:03, Cole Tuininga wrote:
> Dan - A potentially silly question, but that's usually the kind of thing
> that trips one up in the first place.  8)
> 
> On your local workstation, what is your display variable set to?  If it
> is unset, ssh -X 'ing won't work. 

I'm aware of that. The DISPLAY variable is set on my workstation.
Remember that this box works just fine using ssh and remote X
applications on some systems.

The key here seems to be that remote X display works fine if the
remote system is a workstation that is already running X. If
the remote system is configured as a server *without X* (has a
text mode console) then there is no DISPLAY variable defined
on the remote system in the first place and ssh doesn't seem
to define one no matter what switch settings I specify.

This is very likely not a Debian specific issue, BTW. My
original gripe was that I had no idea how to go about
figuring out what package I would need to install on the
remote server so that I could successfully do remote X
displays. Cole answered this by pointing out the

apt-cache search xauth

command that I had not previously known about.

So far nobody else seems to have figured it out either.

-- 
Dan Coutu
Managing Director
Snowy Owl Internet Consulting, LLC
http://www.snowy-owl.com