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.