Problem running remote X applications on a Mac OS X 10.5.5 Intel system

[Andrew Kaplan]

Hi there --

One of our users is trying to connect to a remote Linux system from his Mac, and then run several X applications on that system. He opens up an X terminal, and first types in the following command:

xhost +

He then connects via ssh to the remote system using the following command syntax:

ssh -X -l

Once he is on the remote system, his command shell is tcsh, and the following command is entered:

setenv DISPLAY :0.0

When he tries to start xemacs, or any X application for that matter, he gets the following error message:

X server not responding

Several other users have used the above procedure, and have been able to start the remote X applications without a problem.

Has anyone seen this, and know what the fix is to this problem? Thanks.

[Steven Schweda]

I don't normally deal with it, but ...

> [...] a remote Linux system [...]

How "remote"? (How many X-blocking firewalls
in between?)

I thought that "ssh -X" was supposed to deal
with all the DISPLAY stuff by itself. What
happens if you leave out this step?:

setenv DISPLAY :0.0

Around here (Mac OS 10.4.11), "man ssh" says:

[...]
X11 FORWARDING
[...]
The user should not manually set DISPLAY.
Forwarding of X11 connections can be
configured on the command line or in
configuration files.
[...]

Doing it yourself bypasses the X forwarding
stuff in SSH. You can do that, but it does
make the "-X" rather pointless, and it also
means that you need to get at port 6000 on
the Mac instead of just the SSH stuff.

There's also sshd configuration on the server
side to worry about (about which I also know
little).