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So i'm using Cygwin on my local windows machine with Xming Xserver. What I want to do is set the display variable so I can use the full graphical version of my code editor(XEmacs) on the server.

At the moment I can only SSH into my Ubuntu server and use the text version of the program.

Has anyone got any ideas? Is this a permissions error or is there something I'm missing

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What's the actual error you're seeing? –  Costa Jan 4 '12 at 18:57

2 Answers 2

First of all, you should tell us what commands you have tried and what was the output you got from them.

Since you can ssh:

ssh -CX barney@server xemacs

The -C option is to enable compression. The -X option is to enable X11 forwarding. See the man page of ssh for details.

If you're on a local network this should work fine. If you have a high latency you'll get a little frustrated.

This should work from Linux to Linux, I'm not sure about cygwin since I've never used it.

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i voted for this answer based on Cygwin's documentation: Displaying remote X clients with Cygwin/X is nearly identical to displaying remote X clients with any other X Server. You may use the secure ssh method, or the insecure telnet or rsh method (not recommended). –  Joshua Kersey Nov 14 '12 at 1:23

Cygwin's documentation advises to use -Y instead. Since -Y works, I'd reason that -X works too, but may require special configuration. Pay attention to the notes:


Note: The ssh server will automatically set the DISPLAY environment variable appropriately, typically to something like localhost:10.0, so clients will connect to a proxy X11 display on the remote host from which the X11 protocol will be forwarded over ssh to your X server.

If your login scripts unconditionally set DISPLAY to something else, this will break X11 forwarding.

Note: By default, the OpenSSH server does not allow forwarded X connections. This must be configured on the remote host by adding X11Forwarding yes to the sshd_config configuration file. The OpenSSH server must be restarted or SIGHUP'ed to re-read the configuration file after it is changed.

Note: The OpenSSH server requires the xauth command to be available to forward X connections. Consequently, it must be installed on the remote host.

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