On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Chris G wrote:
I'm currently away from home and I'm trying to get a GUI application running on a machine at home with the display here in N. Wales.
Normally I would connect from the remote location using 'ssh -X' so that the DISPLAY environment variable would be set up to work through the ssh 'pipe' and a GUI app run on the remote machine (at my house) would use the display on the machine where I'm sitting currently (in North Wales).
Is the GUI application in question Firefox?
Is there already an instance of Firefox running on the ssh client machine?
Do you find that a mysterious extra tab opens in this already-running Firefox when you try to run Firefox on the ssh server?
If the answers to all three of these are "yes", then you're suffering from Firefox trying to be too clever: Firefox on the ssh server contacts the X server on the ssh client machine, and asks it if another X client with the same name (i.e. "firefox") is already running. If so, then Firefox on the ssh server machine sends a request to Firefox on the ssh client machine to open a new tab, then exits.
There are three possible solutions to this:
- Give Firefox on the ssh server a different name, using the -a command line option, e.g. firefox -a weirdname
- Suppress all this X question-asking and requesting for one session by giving the -Y option to ssh ssh -Y yourserver
- Forbid all this X question-asking and requesting permanently by rebuilding xorg-server on the ssh client machine with the xc_security compile-time option.