Exporting an Xterm session

[Brett Hamilton]

I'm trying to run an Xwindow application on a remote workstation. I use "export DISPLAY=:0". This works fine for a sigle Xterm window application. However, this particular application tries to launch 4 windows on startup and errors out with a message (Can't start background window). I can run this application fine using Exceed on my laptop, but not on the HP workstation. Someone told me that Exceed is a virtual xterm and can therefor launch multiable windows and that I needed to used the CDE to launch the Xterm. Does this sound correct, and if so how can I di it.

[Mark Fenton]

Brett, you say the application runs fine under Exceed on your laptop, but you can't get it to run on your HP workstation.

The workstation has to be running an Xserver (like Exceed in a Windows environment, or CDE/VUE for UNIX) if your workstation (model unspecified) is running X, as long as you've properly set your DISPLAY environment variable, it should work.

If you were getting a "could not connect" type of error, I would expect that the problem would be solved with "xhost +", but this seems a different sort of problem...

hth

[Brett Hamilton]

Mark, I'm using CDE/VUE on the both UNIX workstations (X-sender and X-reveiver, models 735 & 777, HP-UX 10.2). I can get the Xterm open and it runs single Xwindow programs just fine, such as Xclock or Vee Pro. It's only when I try to run the application that wants to spawn 4 Xwindows on start-up that I get the problem, and as I said before it launches these 4 Xwindows just fine when I use Exceed on a NT PC, so I don't think it's on the x-server side, I have also ran this fine in the past using Reflection on a NT PC. I haven't tried it from any of our other UNIX workstations, but I suspect they may behave the same way?

[Mark Fenton]

Brett,

You obviously know this already, but just so we get our terminology straight --

The service that is displaying a window on your workstation is an Xserver -- either eXceed on your NT box or CDE on your UNIX w/s.

The actual host (or server if you will) upon which the application runs that you wish to display back to the Xserver on your w/s need not run X at all.

So you have been doing something like

1 W/S: start CDE (local XServer)
2 Server (where the application actually runs): export DISPLAY=:0.0 (or suitable display number)

and then when you run the app on your w/s, it craps out with the message you related before.

Hard to fathom why this wouldn't work unless the problem is that you need to "xhost +". But if you can display back an xterm or xclock etc from the remote server...

I don't have any applications that insist upon multiple windows at once, save Glance (motif) but it opened up nicely (once I set xhost +).

[Brett Hamilton]

Mark, the sequence that you listed is what I have been doing. Do you think it could be something odd like the application is looking for some fonts or something that is missing on the Xserver?

[Mark Fenton]

Brett,

Certainly something to look at. Font errors are not always obvious.

Spent some time looking for similar problems in the KB here, but didn't find anything that struck me as a match.

Have you examined the error logs to see if any other hints are there? $HOME/.dt/errorlog, syslog, etc?

[K.Vijayaragavan. · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I have something to share which may be relvent for this.

We can launch the X server of remote worktions on your local workstation by doing the below mentioned steps.

This is just similar to the approach Exceed works in getting the CDE of a hp using XDCMP broadcast. But in the case of Exceed we run it from windows so it has avoided some issues like clash betwen local X server and remote X server )

We can launch the remote Xserver on you local system by ,
1. login to command line mode.
2.issue the command
X -query
Ex.
#X -query 92.12.140.2
This will give the CDE login screen of the second server on your local system.
(Similar to Exceed's approach)

Here you can work as if you are on the remote system.

But to come back to your system , you have to kill this process by telneting to your system from some PC or unix systems.
-Vijay

[Brett Hamilton]

Thanks a lot Vijay and Mark. Problem solved!!!