[plug] Connecting to a Linux Desktop from Mac OS X

[Cameron Patrick]

James Devenish wrote:

> % Xnest :1 &
> % DISPLAY=:1 ssh -X my.linux.host gnome-session --choose-session=Mac

Using xinit would be another possibility here.  Off the top of my head
an appropriate invocation would be

    xinit /full/path/to/Xnest :1 -- ssh -X etc etc

You could also try running /etc/X11/Xsession (assuming a Debian system
here) rather than invoking gnome-session directly.  This will get you
a few extra goodies like an ssh-agent and reading your ~/.Xresources
and so on.

> Perhaps Xnest is neither perfect nor appropriate -- I really don't know!

In my experience, Xnest on Linux is somewhat flakey.  Likely this
applies to the Mac OS X version too if it's based on XFree86?

I would've thought that you could set up OS X's X server to run in a
full-screen or nested window mode rather than the usual rootless way,
thus getting rid of the requirement for the Xnest server.  While I've
never used Mac X11 myself I know of people running ratpoison on their
Macs and I can't think of any way this might be done besides a
full-screen X11 session.  Although this may involve starting up two
instances of X11 if you also want to run some applications in rootless
mode.  (NB. I may be getting the terminology wrong here, I'm borrowing
the terms used by the XFree86 port to MS Windows.)

Cameron.