topic Re: $DISPLAY not getting set in Operating System - Linux

$DISPLAY not getting set

Amod — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 09:58:55 GMT

I have recently installed RedHat 8 on my PC. But when I run the 'Terminal' program my DISPLAY doesn't get set to <0.0>.

I get following
[root@gardner] # echo $DISPLAY
:0.0

What's going wrong ?

Re: $DISPLAY not getting set

Eugen Cocalea_1 — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 11:30:31 GMT

Is hostname set? What does 'hostname' command report?

Re: $DISPLAY not getting set

Steven E. Protter — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:03:08 GMT

If hostname is correctly set, you can set the display in .bash_profile (not sure I spelled that right) or /etc/profile. If its a pc, it will work.

In reality you don't need a hostname set to use red hat in graphical mode. You can set display by IP address.

DISPLAY=10.1.10.77:0.0
export DISPLAY

make sure the IP address is up on a network device like eth0

P

Re: $DISPLAY not getting set

John Meissner — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 14:35:54 GMT

you can also use your hostname to set your display

DISPLAY=hostname:0.0

or if you're telnetting into another server you can set your display by running this script:

var1=$(who -mT | sed -e 's/.*[ ]$[^ ]*$$/\1/')
export DISPLAY=$var1:0.0

Re: $DISPLAY not getting set

Rick Beldin — Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:18:53 GMT

XOpenDisplay() recognizes :0.0 as referencing the local display (console). The hostname is not needed in the local display mode, and XOpenDisplay() can actually (and sometimes does) enable different transport mechanisms depending on how the DISPLAY is set up.

A local display could mean that it would use a more efficient transport, such as shared memory, as opposed to using TCP sockets, which have to go through name resolution and what not.

You also may find that under Linux some of the utilities do not enable TCP sockets for security reasons. For example, xfs (fontserver) doesn't enable socket connections from outside the box in the default mode.