Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Connecting to Other X Window Systems

You can connect from Mac OS X to other X window systems using ssh with X11 forwarding. If you use OpenSSH (which is included with Mac OS X; see Section 7.5), you must use the -X option to request X11 forwarding (the -2 option specifies the ssh Version 2 protocol, as opposed to the older Version 1 protocol). For example:

ssh -2 -X remotemachine -l username

As long as XDarwin is running, this can be entered in either an xterm window or in the Mac OS X Terminal. To have the X11 forwarding enabled in Terminal, you must have the DISPLAY variable set as noted earlier prior to making the connection. (This is always the case if the DISPLAY variable is set in your .tcshrc script.) It is also possible to make a double-clickable application that connects to a remote machine via ssh2 with X11 forwarding enabled. For example, the following script can be used for this purpose:

#!/bin/sh
ssh -2 -X remotemachine -l username

If you’ve installed the commercial version of ssh from http://www.ssh.com, the equivalent of the preceding script is given with the following:

#!/bin/sh
ssh2 remotemachine -l username

Using OroborOSX, you can add a Launch menu item to accomplish the same task. To do this, start by copying the template file found in the directory ~/Library/Preferences/OroborOSX/Launch Menu Items to whatever you’d like to call this application. For this example, suppose you want to connect to a remote machine named chops with a username of sam. Name the application ...