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Remote Window Managers

Apr 29, 2008  By LJ Staff
 in

Lots of times it's extremely frustrating or time consuming to run an xterm on a remote host just to fork your programs from that remote machine. Why not just run your window manager there even though you're not on its console? The window manager is just another X application, after all, isn't it?

Fire off your local X server

xinit /usr/bin/xterm -- :1 &

yields a vanilla X session with merely an xterm running - no window manager. Now you need to add permissions to this window session for the remote host. You can tunnel the connection through SSH if your network is insecure but there's a distinct performance hit. If your network is secure, you can just "xhost +remotehost" and spray directly to your X server:

Tunneled SSH:

ssh -fY remotehost /usr/bin/wmaker

or spray directly:

xhost +remotehost
ssh -f remotehost /usr/bin/wmaker -display localmachine:1

The first option, if your remote SSH server supports it, will use a locally defined DISPLAY that then gets tunneled to your local side over SSH. The second option allows remotehost to send X data directly to your local display, then runs WindowMaker there but displaying it locally. Now all your desktop actions are done on the remote machine, not locally.

Our special thanks to Bill from Washington state for this tech tip.
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"Extremely frustrating"?

janpla's picture
Submitted by janpla (not verified) on Fri, 05/16/2008 - 09:18.

It seems like a lot of work - are you guys running Windows on desktop machines?

This is what I do - I find it works a charm; but then I run Linux on my desktop:

Open a local xterm or similar. Log on to the remote machine with 'ssh -X user@remote'. The '-X' means that X programs on the remote machine are displayed on your local desktop. No need for 'export DISPLAY' or 'xhost +'. You have to set up the configuration files on you local as well as remote machine, though (they are in /etc/ssh).

Couldn't make it run.

JM's picture
Submitted by JM (not verified) on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 16:24.

Its a pity that it does not work for me because I am needing desperately such a kind of feature for my system. I Installed wmaker in the remote host, but it didn't work. It says:

/usr/bin/wmaker fatal error: could not open display "CompUBUNTU:1"

where "compUBUNTU" is the name of my local machine which, by the way, runs a UBUNTU Hardy distro, while the remote host is running Fedora 8. It shouldn't be a network issue because the two computers are connected to the same LAN with no particular filters or firewalls between them.

Any suggestion?

And if you dislike Window Maker?

Jay Dugger's picture
Submitted by Jay Dugger on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 22:08.

Will this tech tip still work with a window manager that doesn't have a "-display" option, such as xmonad?

Sometimes the delete key serves best.

Used to do this

jonadair's picture
Submitted by jonadair (not verified) on Tue, 04/29/2008 - 07:55.

I used to do this, holy moley, 18 years ago. We had a lab full of Mac II's running Apple's A/UX. The machines struggled to run much besides the X server. Since I was already running most everything else remotely, one day I fired up TWM remotely and it worked reasonably well. So I hacked up my .xinitc so that when I started X on one of the A/UX boxes, it ran TWM and everything else from our 10 processor Sequent box.

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