Performing xserver activities through tty or remote ssh shells

2 Sep 2019

If you have an Xserver running in a remove computer, you can perform GUI related actions via ssh.

After logging in, set the DISPLAY variable to :0.0 or to :0 or any other if necessary (which can be found by issuing w command and looking at the from field).

Export the display as an environment variable using:

 export DISPLAY=:0.0

Then issue your GUI commands like you do in the terminal.

Note: apparently you cannot run a gui program in other user’s tty even by setting the DISPLAY to the user’s tty.

Simple GTK pop-ups:

First export DISPLAY as above. There is a software called zenity that’ll do your work. See zenity --help for more options. Example:

 zenity --info --text "hello there!"

Launching remote GUI elements locally

While loggin in via ssh, use -X to allow the local Xserver to display the output of the remote Xserver. e.g.

ssh -X user@remote-host:~/
firefox