On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 02:18:59PM +0000, John Long wrote: > On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 08:22:20AM -0500, Luis Mochan wrote:
> > Maybe this is a dumb question: as we can use IMAP to access remote > > mailboxes, could we also use it to access other remote files with > > configuration commands and 'source' them? > > No, IMAP is specifically an email protocol and isn't good for the general > case of files. And even if it was, you would need IMAP servers running on > all the other computers... I didn't explain this very well. The issue (as I understand it from reading 3 posts in this thread) is you want to be able to access a file wherever it is and open it with whatever application is appropriate. You can't usually do that because most of these applications can't find the file. What X forwarding does is allow you to run X applications for example a browser, a file manager, OpenOffice.org on some PC and actually control it from the PC you're using now. If you're running Mutt over SSH then it is going to save and read files from the remote machine. When you try to open an attachment that needs X (like a PDF, .doc, etc) if you have X forwarding set in SSH the program on the same box Mutt is already running on can open it, but it will display it on *your* terminal. The problem of accessing files remotely doesn't exist in this case because Mutt, the file you want to open, and the application are *all* running on the remote host, only the *display* part of it is being done on your local system. This is much harder to understand than to actually do. You should try and see if you can SSH to the Mutt host with the -X or -Y options and then start a program that uses X and see if you get an error about invalid display or whether your application pops up on your local machine. Then we can go from there. -- ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) Powered by Lemote Fuloong against HTML e-mail X Loongson MIPS and OpenBSD and proprietary / \ http://www.mutt.org attachments Code Blue or Go Home!
