Archive for the ‘Mac User’ tag
Run X11 Apps on Mac
It’s possible folks didn’t notice but Mac OS X no longer includes XQuartz by default from Maverick forward. You need to download XQuartz and install it. I’d recommend after you install Xcode.
Launch XQuartz and then either use the bash
shell it opens or open a Terminal bash
shell session. Inside the shell, you might start Secure Shell (ssh
) like this:
Mac-Pro-3:~ michaelmclaughlin$ ssh student@192.168.2.170 student@192.168.2.170's password: Last login: Thu Jun 4 14:33:37 2015 [student@localhost ~]$ xclock & [1] 10422 [student@localhost ~]$ Error: Can't open display: |
Granted that’s a trivial error and running the xclock X11 applications isn’t crucial, an error that makes it more important is the following from Oracle’s old Designer/2000 application:
FRM-91111: Internal Error: window system startup failure. FRM-10039: Unable to start up the Form Builder. |
This is the desired behavior. Secure shell (ssh
) can’t run it unless you make the connection with the -Y
flag. You should use the following syntax:
Mac-Pro-3:~ michaelmclaughlin$ ssh -Y student@192.168.2.170 student@192.168.2.170's password: Last login: Tue Jun 9 14:56:55 2015 from 192.168.2.1 /usr/bin/xauth: file /home/student/.Xauthority does not exist [student@localhost ~]$ xclock & [1] 10760 |
You can safely ignore the .Xauthority does not exist warning message because it’ll create a .Xauthority
file and store the magic cookie after the warning message. You should see the xclock
program running in the upper left hand corner of your console, like:
It’s terrific that you don’t get a font warning like you typically would using UTF-8 on Linux. Nice that the Mac OS fonts are so well done that there isn’t a raised exception.
Using xclock
or xeyes
isn’t very useful as a rule, but this method also lets you run any of the Linux GUI applications. For example, the following gedit
command lets you run the gedit
utility from a Mac OS console. If you’ve installed the gedit
plug-ins, you also can use the Terminal console on the remote system.
The process sequence for the command-line is shown below:
1030 1 /usr/sbin/sshd -D - The root process launches the ssh daemon 3145 1030 sshd: student [priv] - The sshd launches a ssh session to manage a student ssh session 3152 3145 sshd: student@pts/1 - The ssh session launched to manage the ssh session 3166 3152 -bash - The bash shell launched by connecting through the ssh session 3240 3166 gedit - The gedit command issued inside a ssh session 3166 3240 gnome-pty-helper - Launching the gedit session across X11 3169 3240 /bin/bash - Launching the Terminal session inside the gedit session across X11 3269 3884 ps -ef - Command run inside the gedit Terminal session |
Hope that helps those who want to use X11 applications on the Mac OS.