Remote X Applications

I know, I know…I’ve disappeared for a while. Summer is busy for me and I had to…..well I really have no excuse, but I’m back again for at least a while.

As you may or probably do not know, my work environment is composed of 29 glorious, non-windows servers. A fair amount of them are Solaris 9 with a dusting of Solaris 10, with the rest being various Linux distros. I wish I could change them all to the same distro but everything works, so I won’t complain too much. I occasionally wander away from the command line and need to run an X application of some sort; usually an installer. No problem right? From a CLI, just type xhost + , ssh to the Solaris box I need, export the display and that’s it…run any X app you like. Wait…what’s this? Error: Can’t open display: ????

This was making me mad….I had to install Oracle and didn’t feel like having to dig around to find out what the problem was. I brought up my Chatzilla window and logged into #ubuntu ( a great place for answers) The solution was simple and I believe it is a new security “feature” in 7.04 ( but I’m not 100% sure) All you have to do is go to the system menu, click on Administration and then click on Login Window. From there, click on the security tab and un-check the “Deny TCP connections to Xserver” check box….that’s it. Everything will work as expected from there.

There is a chance that this could possibly be a security hole but it’s easy enough to toggle on and off when needed if you’re paranoid. Hope this helps.

Dale

Don’t forget what happened on 05/01/2007

I’ll just post this picture…some will get it, some will not….spread the code.

Beryl. Take 2.

In case you haven’t read, I received my new T40 the other day. I decided to install Ubuntu Feisty on it instead of Edgy, mainly because I read that it had built in support for XGL and Beryl/Compiz goodies. Once installed, I started poking around. Navigating to system->preferences, I noticed a new option called Desktop Effects

This worked! Well it sort of worked. I was getting odd behavior where menu items weren’t showing up in some windows. NOTHING was showing up in a terminal, I mean not even typed text. But hey, the windows wobbled and the cube was there. I figured that I was on the right track. So for fun, I fed The Google “Feisty T40” to see what got regurgitated . The first hit I got was a link to a thread on the Ubuntu Forums telling the requester, who was having the same issue, to type the following 2 commands.

gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/hsize 4

gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/number_of_desktops 1

I figured it was worth a shot. BAM! It worked. I like these cool effects, I’m a eye candy weenie I suppose. For a couple of days I was happy…then I thought I’d give full blown Beryl a shot. I mean, I’m basically there right?

So this morning my Dad and I have a 9:00am tee time. As I sit here drinking my coffee, I opened up a terminal window and type.
sudo apt-get install beryl beryl-manager emerald-themes

After a few minutes I try to launch beryl-manager…….VIOLA!  It works. Now I don’t know what I was missing with my last T40, but I couldn’t get this to work for anything. The folks working on Feisty have done an outstanding job putting this together and I’m thankful.

On a side note, I hear that the shipit site was down with a message that they would be back shortly shipping shiny new Feisty CDs, but I can’t verify that as it appears to be back to normal now.

Here’s a screenshot.

Dale