X Window System (or X11) is the standard way for displaying graphics on whiteout. X may seem counter-intuitive at first as the X server is used to display graphs while the clients connect to it. X clients could include xterm, file managers, web browsers etc. Typically you will need to run an X server on your own machine. People running linux will no doubt have X running already. People on Windows machines will need to install X-Win32. Talk to your local support in order to get a license.
X clients can be run from the command line. It is usually useful to run them in the background as well so the terminal window is free.
Eg
% xterm &
% mozilla &
The X clients know which X server to connect to by looking at the DISPLAY environment variable. This is normally set on your local computer to point to your own machine or set by SSH if you are using X tunnelling.
Setting DISPLAY manually
% export DISPLAY=yourmachine.utas.edu.au:0
% xterm &
you will need to make sure that your computer accepts X connections. And that xhost allows connections from whiteout.
Setting DISPLAY through ssh
SSH can setup a virtual DISPLAY connection through an SSH connection and set the DISPLAY variable automatically for you.
localmachine% ssh -l username whiteout.sf.utas.edu.au -X
remotemachine% echo $DISPLAY
localhost:14.0
remotemachine% xterm &
-X tells SSH to perform the tunnelling. Even though DISPLAY says that localhost(or the remote machine in this case) is the X server, this is actually a pseudo server tunnelling directly to your local machine
Setting up X-Win32
Further instructions to follow. X-Win32 works by calling a remote program on whiteout to connect to your local machine. You will need to specify “SSH” connection for this to work as rexec is not available.
