This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
From: Brian Anderson <bunicula@mediaone.net> Date: OK, i'm no expert, but i'll try to give a quick rundown. you need to tell the system you are logged into what your display is. so say there are two machines, 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.3. you are logged into the .3 machine many (most?) X apps will accept a -display command line option (xterm -display 192.168.0.2:0.0) you can also set the DISPLAY environmental variable: from bash: export DISPLAY=192.168.0.2:0.0 the other part of the equation is permission to access the X server. on the machine you are physically at, you'll need to give permission to access the display to the remote machine: xhost 192.168.0.3 that will tell the machine you are at that 192.168.0.3 has permission to access your display. same goes for su root.... === From: Joe Brenner <doom@kzsu.Stanford.EDU> Date: > Say I'm at my linux box, logged in remotely to an > SGI or Sun W/S and I want to use emacs. In many cases, what you want to do is run emacs like this: emacs -nw which will ignore all the Xwindows stuff, and just use your terminal window to run emacs. This is particularly recommended on slow dial-ups, though if your terminal software is screwy (the Windows bundled software is pretty bad), you may need to hit ESC rather than use the Alt key, and you may have problems setting the mark without doing something really clumsy like Esc x set-mark-command. > How do I deal with the display issues related to > doing this? I think what you're looking for is the DISPLAY environment variable. After you've logged in remotely, you may need to do a setenv DISPLAY nameofthemachinethatyoureon:0 or I guess if you're using bash export DISPLAY="nameofthemachinethatyoureon:0" Afterwards, you should be able to run emacs (or netscape or whatever) and you should get an X "server" window popping up for the "client" software that you're running on the remote machine. (If you ever read anything about X, you need to keep in mind that for some unaccountable reason they got the terms client and server backwards... in conversation I try and say "backend" and "frontend" to prevent confusion.) > Similarly, say I'm logged in as matthew on my linux box, > but have su'd to root. How do I deal with the display issues related to > using emacs in this case? I'm not sure about what issue you're getting at here. > In other words, what command line options do I enter, and can you help > me understand them so that I might be able to adapt them to new and > different machines/situations? Is there an online How-To for this sort > of thing? You can try running "man X". Personally, my favorite reference about X windows is "The Unix-Haters Handbook" by Garfinkel, Weise & Strassmann, published by IDG (though they didn't have any at LinuxWorld for some reason). You might want to keep in mind that they're somewhat biased. > Oddly enough this sort of thing is no problem for me on Windows > machines b/c we have installed a piece of software called eXodus which > allows us to log into any of our department Unix machines and have > their desktop appear on the Win machine's display as if we were sitting > at the Unix machine. Yeah, halfway decent software will attempt to set the DISPLAY environment variable automatically. ===