Displaying Remote Applications on your Local Workstation
Updated March 25, 2002
Created March 25, 2002
Here are the basic steps for exporting the display from a Remote system to your local system:
The following command is run on your local workstation and allows the remote system to forward its graphical output to your local screen:
xhost +RemoteIP
The following two commands is run on the remote system, possibly via a network login. The first command configures the remote system to forward any graphical applications to your local workstation. The second command is your remote application you wish to run.:
export DISPLAY="LocalIP:0.0"
RemoteApp &
Note: Various versions of SSH will automatically set up forwarding of remote graphical applications to your local workstation via the same secured SSH connection. To check if this the case, just log in via SSH, then check the DISPLAY variable using the set command: "set | grep DISPLAY". Please note that you can override this if you choose using the above commands. On occasion you may wish to override this automatic forwarding through the secured channel - especially if the remote system is not very powerful and a secured channel is not required - remember that all communication through the ssh connection is encrypted and decrypted adding overhead to both systems.
Here are some examples of getting a Remote Application to display on your local workstation screen:
RemoteIP is the IP address or hostname of the remote server which has the application you wish to run and have displayed on your local workstation.
LocalIP is your the IP address or hostname of your local workstation.
The above commands could work very similar when using the rsh command set; however, rsh is not as secure as ssh - the password is sent in plain text over the network when using rsh. See insecureapps.html for details on which applications which compromise security.
Your local workstation can be running either Linux or Windows. If running Windows locally, then you should install an X-Server to be able to display the remote application locally. Here is a listing of X-Servers for Windows:
VNC - a very lightweight solution; however, not an X-Servervnc.html http://cygwin.com/xfree/ - This one is a good solution - you get a lot of extra utilities that Linux has and Windows lacks: ssh client, cvs, wget, ... This is very comparable to Hummingbird's Exceed. http://www.microimages.com - Free TNTlite (Was called MI/X Server) - I've used this on in the past http://www.hummingbird.com - not free www.xwinpro.com/x-server.html - not free prevnextindexNEW! Search this Site!: