SSH X11 Forwarding on Ubuntu server

Fri, 2008-08-01 09:11 — spidie

I use X11 forwarding a fair bit with ssh - it's so nice to just do "ssh -X user@host" and be able to run the odd command that needs X.

Anyway - came across a little problem this morning with a Ubuntu server that I was trying to do this on. For those that have never used Ubuntu server - it is like the full Ubuntu desktop but basically with all the X stuff stripped out. I like to run this - as I really don't need X on a headless server and it saves me on some CPU/memory and makes apt-get upgrade nice and fast.

Anyway - back to X11 forwarding - with Ubuntu server when I tried to launch an X application - I got the message
Error: no display specified
Had a look through the environment variables - and the DISPLAY variable had not been set like ssh -X automatically does. Tried to set it manually, but nothing.

I then discovered with the help of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSHHowto that xauth is not installed by default with Ubuntu server. A quick.
apt-get install xauth
Fixed everything up nicely. Happy happy joy joy.