Just discovered the awesomeness of X forwarding

[Red Squirrel]

I knew about it, I heard about it, but I never thought of actually trying it. It's very simple.

ssh to a server using -X as a flag. In the ssh console type the command for a GUI app. It will show up locally! Basically it's like Citrix, but free, and less clunky, and easier to use. Way faster to load too. :biggrin:

Though, it only works well over a fast network, I tried it from work and launched firefox on my home server and it took like a minute to load and it was not usable.

I could technically replace my PC with a raspberry Pi and run everything off my server. :hmm: I imagine stuff like games would not work very well though. :biggrin:

 

[MrColin]

AFAIK audio forwarding can't be done. But yeah, its pretty cool. The Xming client allows you to do it in a windows pc and it works on OSX too.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I was thinking about audio after, guessing it would just play on the server?

 

[bobross419]

Its cool, but the only time I've ever found it to be useful is to take advantage of a GUI config for something that takes a bit of tweaking on multiple files... Like configuring Kerberos authentication.

 

[mv2devnull]

Welcome to the 20th century! Those days! A 2400 baud modem connection. Commercial X server on Windows 3.1. Emacs in remote system, showing its GUI on local server. Proof of concept, but CLI mode was so much faster. Terms "X server" and "X client" are ancient.


While the name ssh, secure shell (an alternative for remote shell, rsh), points to interactive shell sessions, ssh has always been about tunneling. For quite long now the encrypted tunneling has been referred as VPN, virtual private network. The "forward X" option in ssh is simply a "for convenience" configuration for one specific tunneling need.


For next revelation, do look up "freenx".

 

[sourceninja]

looks like you can forward audio http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/08/sound-on-linux-is-confusing-defuzzing-part-2-pulseaudio/

 

[Netopia]

Welcome to the 20th century! Those days! A 2400 baud modem connection. Commercial X server on Windows 3.1. Emacs in remote system, showing its GUI on local server. Proof of concept, but CLI mode was so much faster. Terms "X server" and "X client" are ancient.


While the name ssh, secure shell (an alternative for remote shell, rsh), points to interactive shell sessions, ssh has always been about tunneling. For quite long now the encrypted tunneling has been referred as VPN, virtual private network. The "forward X" option in ssh is simply a "for convenience" configuration for one specific tunneling need.


For next revelation, do look up "freenx".

Totally unnecessary negativity and sarcasm. People learn all sorts of new things that open mental doors to other possibilities. Whether those things are old news to you or not should be of no consequence. Perhaps the old adage says it best..... if you don't have anything good to say....

 

[v-600]

Digging up this old post, I just found myself doing the same thing. Running a headless raspberry pi and its faster to forward just the window you want, rather than try and to a whole remote desktop session (though CLI is faster still it can be a pain for some tasks). I think that while Xorg is ancient, it is well tested/well understood, and with low powered, monitor-less hardware, the client server model still has a place.

On an aside, I watched this a few days ago. Worth a go through to the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pOxlazS3zs especially for echoing the xorg comments here.