How to: Run Gimp from Linux Machine and display on Mac OSX

How to: Run Gimp from Linux Machine and display on Mac OSX

Unix machines are known for their great versatility in configuration, and their “power”. Traditionally Unix machines were “headless” or without a monitor or other display device except for Terminals. These days another whole computer can replace the terminal. But Unix machines as the whole tend to be pretty beefy machines when it comes to CPU and RAM. Instead of just using it as a glorified File Server, with a few simple commands they can used to run pretty complex pieces of software such as the Gimp.

On the OS X side make sure you’ve got X11 installed. Follow the XCode Install Directionshere.

Once that is done, launch an X11 window and type ‘xhost +’ or optionally ‘xhost +machinename’ or ‘xhost +username’ xhost allows other computers to use your X11 program as the display instead of their own display. The + means everybody which might be bad for security, but good if you’re going to be using a lot of different machines. Looking at the man page it can be limited to just machine name or even specific users names.

Login to the remote machine using ssh or telnet.

type ‘setenv DISAPLY :0.0’ in a tsch or csh shell. Bash will not work. This tells the remote machine to redirect it’s display to your machine.

Launch software! In this case just type gimp, but you may have to type in the full path to the software.

Leave a Reply