(X tunnelling) xhost: unable to open display

23 07 2008

I’m running ubuntu 8.04 and had a problem tunneling the X display from a solaris box to my local ubuntu test server.

when executing this command in my bash script:

DISPLAY=localhost:0
export DISPLAY
xhost +

i would get the following message

xhost: unable to open display “localhost:0″

The problem being the by default ubuntu restricts tcp listening with the following configuration default in:

/etc/gdm/gdm.conf

# If true this will basically append -nolisten tcp to every X command line, a
# good default to have (why is this a "negative" setting? because if it is
# false, you could still not allow it by setting command line of any particular
# server).  It's probably better to ship with this on since most users will not
# need this and it's more of a security risk then anything else.
# Note: Anytime we find a -query or -indirect on the command line we do not add
# a "-nolisten tcp", as then the query just wouldn't work, so this setting only
# affects truly attached sessions.
DisallowTCP=true

To fix the error message you can cgange the config option to:

DisallowTCP=false


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2 responses

8 10 2008
Patrick

Hi, do you know how to get the desktop of an Ubuntu computer to stretch to another Ubuntu computer. Xdmx, xhost are used….

8 10 2008
tony78it

not sure exactly what you want to achieve there or if you’ve seen it done… but there’s “remote login” and “remote desktop sharing”… http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Edgy/RemoteAccess

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