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Remote X11 Sessions? 17

Posted by Cliff from the more-than-just-setting-your-DISPLAY dept.
fyrebryan writes "I am fairly new to linux (approx 1 year), and while I have gotten fairly good at working with linux (and love it!!) there is something that i have not been able to find much info about on the web. it is how to run an X Windows session remotely. Security is something that does have me worried, but i am fairly sure that security has already been addressed. If anyone could please help me out and point me to some more info about running X remotely (and possibly on a Win9x machine) it would be greatly appreciated." Is there a good, comprehensive primer on remote X11 sessions that include things like setting up: encrypted X11 sessions, common xhost and MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE problems and so forth? Sometimes, pointing your DISPLAY environment variable to the right server just isn't sufficient, and combing thru man pages don't yield much in the search for workable information.
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Remote X11 Sessions? More

Remote X11 Sessions?

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  • It was a joke...If there was anything opensource/free as good as Visual SlickEdit V6 or Borland Kylix I would use it.
  • If anyone can tell me how I can get simple text-terminals (i.e. a telnet login prompt) sent to my workstation's virtutual terminals, let me know. I can do it via a serial cable, but over TCP/IP it seems much more difficult.

    If you just want a plain login prompt on your text consoles, getty is what you want. Just point getty at ttyX and you're most of the way there. (Do it in /etc/inittab. Most of the distros do this for you...)

    If that's not what you wanted, then perhaps you can elaborate on your question?

    --Joe
    --

  • XWin (Score:1)

    by ffsnjb ( 238634 )
    XWin32 is a win32 app that displays remote X sessions. I don't use it, but I've heard it works well. The last version I saw wasn't freeware, so you'll have to pay for it, but if you'll be using windows, you're used to paying for software anyway. :)

  • I also do not pay for software, as you can see from the little FreeBSD advocacy blurb on the front page of my webserver. The only thing relating to computing on my desktop that I paid for is the hardware itself, as it should be. YAY!

  • O'Reilly as usual (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I would recommend O'Reilly's X Window System Administrator's Guide (ISBN 0-937175-83-8). It's a little dated, but covers a lot of this ground nevertheless (for that matter, The Unix Programming Environment is extremely dated, but I find it indispensible).

    You're welcome.

    Tom

  • Pay for software??? Are you crazy??? I would write more but I have to get back to using Kylix and Visual Slickedit V6.0... ;->

  • SSH (Score:2)

    by Drew M. ( 5831 )
    As long as secure shell is setup (usually the default setting works fine), just ssh into the machine you'd like the app to run on:

    ssh username@yourmachine.yours.com

    then after the password just run an X app just like you would locally:

    xeyes

    trust me, it's too easy. Completely secure also (X is transmitted back over the encrypted channel).

  • There's a GPL'd Java app called WeirdX [freshmeat.net] that functions as an X server. Since That covers the remote X on win9x part. I'm don't know of any way to use it securely, though. (hmm, maybe that would be a good project, a Java ssh client with X forwarding...)

  • I'm not trying to sound elitist here, though I am beginning to wonder what exactly the criteria are for having a question posted to Ask Slashdot.

    You see, this question is such a basic one, such a FAQ, that it has been answered countless times before. A simple google search using the terms "remote", "X" and "howto" as parameters will pull up more than enough resources, including the ever-so-popular "Remote X HOWTO" on many sites across the internet.

    Now, don't think I'm into bashing newbies, only slashdot editors ;). We were *all* there once before, so I think a much more appropriate question for this forum would be more along the lines of "what are currently the best on-line resources for a newbie to learn Linux" or something like that. That way, we could get answers much more useful to a larger segment of the "Linux population", myself included.

  • VNC (Score:2)

    by fliplap ( 113705 )
    no matter what anyone says, VNC is _not_ a reasonable alternative to remote X sessions. Its slow and requires that the whole screen be displayed instead of just the one running program. For example, i use remote X to control my home mp3 player with gqmpeg, if i were using VNC i would have to look at the whole desktop, it wouldn't be transparent like this is. What VNC is good for is viewing Windows desktops in unix or other, since windows doesn't really have much remote admin to speak of. Seeing how my Windows box is 2 rooms over (i don't want to contaminate this room) VNC works out for me very well in that situation. There was actually just an ask /. about free Win32 x-servers alittle while ago. The one i like is X-Win32 which is available at www.starnet.com [starnet.com] and while it isn't free it is a pretty good product.
  • You could also do a web demo of Citrix Metaframe [citrix.com] and run Win2k and Office apps over the internet. Seriously though you can look at their Metaframe for Unix [citrix.com] product. It does everything X does but is supposed to be more managed, secure, portable, etc. Their screenshots are mostly a Unix version of StarOffice 5.1 running on win2k. It a little more money than I can justify.
  • If ssh doesn't seem to forward X by default, try adding the "-X" option on the commandline. I've had to do that on Mandrake 8 (beta1).
  • Over at www.Workspot.com
    They give you a free acount with Free X-windows over the net.
    Perty cool, escpecially when I can show off Linux from an old crappy p100 from school.
    And it always amazes people that its not actually on that computer, its on a computer that could be 1/2 way around the world.

  • I've been trying to do this recently myself, and have had a good amount of success. There are a few HOWTOs that you definetly need to read before you get too deep into it. Specifically, the XDMCP HOWTO, Remote-X-Apps MINI-HOWTO, and the XDM-Xterm MINI-HOWTO. Also, I looked at the Diskless HOWTO because essentially what is geared for diskless machines is also helpful.

    Now, if you're really feeling good, set up your X Server such that vt7 and vt8 are your local X server, vt9 is your home server, and vt10 is that kickass work computer that you hate to have sit all night without someone monkeying around on it.

    If anyone can tell me how I can get simple text-terminals (i.e. a telnet login prompt) sent to my workstation's virtutual terminals, let me know. I can do it via a serial cable, but over TCP/IP it seems much more difficult.

  • X FAQ (Score:3)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:34PM (#365291) Journal
    Here is a like to a collection of X related faqs from comp.windows.x

    X FAQ [landfield.com]

  • Virtual Network Computing (Score:3)

    by The Unconquered One ( 308172 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:48PM (#365292)
    AT&T's research department released VNC [att.com], the Virtual Network Computing client under the GNU GPL. There's a short tutorial [freebsdzine.org] from the FreeBSD Zine explaining how to set up VNC, but for the most part, it applies to Linux also.

    VNC is a real gem because it is truly platform independent, and can run on even the most nonUnix systems such as Windows. No need to install a bulky X server on the client machine just to run a few xterms or oclocks.

  • ssh is pretty standard for this (Score:4)

    by texarkana ( 325806 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @07:42PM (#365293)
    Ssh is very easy to configure for this - indeed many installations turn it on by default! Read your ssh client docs for how to do it or do a google search. This works great for unix and windows-based ssh clients and X servers.

    Even with this, you must still secure your X server. Do not use host based security(xhost)security, make sure that is set to allow no hosts. (I think you need to allow localhost if using windows with ssh - it's been a while )

    I would use the ssh mechanism even on the local LAN as it is simple to implement and pretty
    transparent to users.

    Magic cookie with xauth works well. I know there are issues with the type of cookie and whether you are using NFS to distribute the cookies, etc. but I haven't worked in that type of environment in a while. R5 can do XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1, but you had to do some tweaks to make it work.

    There is an old oreilly book 'X Window System Administrator's Guide' that is pretty good, though it doesn't cover release 6. Presumably
    R6 added some security stuff, but I've never looked into this.

    This seems somewhat informative:
    http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/mini/Remote- X- Apps-6.html

    Hope this helps,
    TeX

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