> That worked perfectly Greg. Thanks! I'm not sure I understand why I
> needed to do that but I'll save your message and look into it further.
Sorry. I was in the middle of something when I was replying and
I was trying to just give you the information to make it work.
So, now some explanation:
The $DISPLAY environment variable holds the current X display you
are working on. It is in the form of hostname:displaynumber . For
Instance my laptop is reilly, and my display is reilly:0.0 (being
programmers, they count from 0). X can have multiple displays on one
machine, and they would be reilly:1.0 reilly:2.0 reilly:3.0 ...
(I'm not sure what the part after the dot it for).
Now, I can run a program on another machine and have it appear
on my display, so if I telnet to celine(another machine at home),
and if my $DISPLAY is still reilly:0.0 I could run xterm
(or another application) and have X forward it to my display.
xhost controls who has permission to write to your screen.
xhost +localhost allows any user on your machine to write to your s
creen. So to actually let me write to reilly:0.0 when I'm on celine,
I'd have to do an xhost +celine, when I'm on reilly
However, the default X protocol is a security problem( I can't exactly
explain how, but everyone[1] knows it), and an enormous pain
in the b*tt, so If you are interested in running programs on another
machine and having them forwarded to your display, you should look into
Secure Shell. It will encrypt your connection( no one can sniff your
password), and it will take care of all of the X nonsense, and forward
the applications with encryption.
Hope this makes stuff somewhat clearer.
further reading at
$man X
$man xhost
$man Xsecurity
be forewarned. It doesn't make much sense, and includes all kinds
of sillyness like MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 ( yes that's right, the way
they decide if a program can write to your screen is magic).
have fun linuxing
> I guess I better look at mutt too :)
not if you like gui's. But hey, it lets me write my email in vi.
[1]Meaning everyone who has been told so. You are now part of everyone[1] :-)
greg
--
this is not here
