ATM I'll probably be doing Bash scripting, Perl Scripting, XML, and whatever UNIX stuff comes up whenever I'm writing, but for now and for a relativly simple start; X display fowarding...
This is the setup: Linux/Unix based "client" and "server"; in my case I have headless systems that i fiddle with from time to time, but after a while vim just becomes a pain, and as for viewing html files etcetc copying things back and forth is a pain in the ass.
The solution is already there; From its beginning the X server has always been client server based on some level. Basically what were gonna do is tell the server to use the client as an X display; this is controlled thru an environment variable, strangly called DISPLAY
Lets assume were using SSH. *nix SSHd has a simple system for fowarding and routing the relevent X ports (these wont show up in your "tunnels" tab if your using something like putty, but you shouldnt be using putty anyway)
Theres two versions of this fowarding ability, X and Y. in a nutshell, X is compressed and encrypted. Y isnt. On slow links, Y is probably your best bet, also some servers dont support the X flag. Also also, some sysadms disable this X fowarding.
Anyway, to the point.
login to the server thusly
client# ssh user@server -X
then when you get a shell check to see if DISPLAY isnt already set (some servers are good enough to do this for you)
server# echo $DISPLAY
if your lucky it'll say localhost:10.0
otherwise it'll probably say :0.0 or something similar
If your in this unlucky situation, just enter
server# DISPLAY=localhost:10:0
then try it out, by running the clock and forking it into the background (&)
server# xclock &
Job done. Later
