Saturday, August 11, 2007

trouble with xemacs and other X11 apps on solaris

I recently found out the cause for some strange problems on solaris when connecting to it via ssh and then trying to use X11 applications. This was when I tried to get xemacs working on solaris. The problem was that all was well until I tried to use cut-n-paste, including deleting characters or lines in xemacs. As soon as the function was invoked an X11 error message appeared and the application froze. It was necessary to kill xemacs (or whatever the X11 app was) using kill -9. For quite a while I thought it was because somehow I built the app wrongly. Eventually, I found this link with an explanation for cygwin users: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#q-ssh-no-x11forwarding It is an FAQ where the question is: X11Forwarding does not work with OpenSSH under Cygwin. This turns out to be generally applicable for users of X11 apps when connected to machines via ssh. It is not specific to cygwin. Just remember to always ssh using the -Y option. Then all will be solved!

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