Enabling Remote X (Shallow Thoughts)

Enabling Remote X

Another in the series of "I keep forgetting how to do this and have to figure it out again each time, so this time I'm going to write it down!"

Enabling remote X in a distro that disables it by default:

Of course, you need xhost. For testing, xhost + enables access from any machine; once everything is working, you may want to be selective, xhost hostname for the hosts from which you're likely to want to connect.

If you log in to the console and start X, check /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc and see if it starts X with the -nolisten flag. This is usually the problem, at least on Debian derivatives: remove the -nolisten tcp.

If you log in using gdm, gdmconfig has an option in the Security tab: "Always disallow TCP connections to X server (disables all remote connections)". Un-checking this solves the problem, but logging out won't be enough to see the change. You must restart X; Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will do that.

Update: If you use kdm, the configuration to change is in /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc

Tags: linux, X11, networking
[ 13:52 Aug 01, 2005    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]