Thursday, February 19, 2009

Display X windows on X11.app from another linux box

Sometimes you might want to ssh to a linux box and be able to fire up X applications and see the X windows on your Mac running X11. However, there are some customizations you need to do before everything works.

  1. Fire up X11.app (It's located in /Applications/Utilities/X11.app)
  2. On Mac box: go to X11 preferences and enable "Allow connections from network clients" (Make sure it looks like below)
  3. Restart X11.app
  4. Open a terminal in X11 and do: xhost +
  5. ssh to your linux box and do: export DISPLAY=IP_OF_MAC_BOX:0.0




Bingo! On the linux box, you can now run any X app, say xterm and the X window will pop up on your Mac box.
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5 comments:

TP said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
May 24, 2010 at 12:04 PM
TP said...

Thank you so much. This thing was driving me crazy, it was your tip to restart X11 that did the trick.

(only now I realize that the settings dialog explicitly say that a restart is required. Shame on me).

Thanks a lot.

May 24, 2010 at 12:07 PM
Ørjan said...

Won't "ssh -X" do the same thing, and you won't need to use xhost? xhost is not very secure. Much better to tunnel things through ssh.

July 19, 2010 at 5:37 AM
Marcelo said...

Hi!
And what about all the way around?
Can i access my Mac using X11 forwarding from another Mac (or even from a linux machine)?
I'm trying to do this for a while but always unsuccessful

Cheers

January 7, 2011 at 4:32 AM
Anonymous said...

Great this is what i wanted..works great.

thanks a lot..

May 23, 2012 at 1:34 PM

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