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Remote clients

Once access has been granted to a remote client it is allowed to display things on an X terminal, yet because machines can be granted access to many X terminals they have to be told explicitly which one to usegif.

It is possible to tell each individual program which X terminal to use:

$xterm -display einstein:0 &
$
Note the & at the end of the command line. We still want to be able to use our current window, while opening a new one.

Alternatively it is possible to set an environment variable, which tells all programs started from that shell to use a certain display:

$ export DISPLAY=einstein:0
$ xterm &

Any program that use the X-Windows display mechanism can be used in this way. Even window managers can be run on remote machines. Beware though that X-Windows needs a lot of bandwidth and is best not used over dialup lines.



Mark O. Stitson
Wed Sep 25 10:45:32 BST 1996