Thanks for the history lesson. Hard to find info like that.
So if I understand things now:
1.) I have to give up all the pretty things that AIX CDE could do for
me except a terminal window. I can't use the file manager.
2.) I open an xterm on my iMac and the ssh -X to my AIX target and
that's it.
PS: to any other X newbie out there: it helps to turn "full screen" off
in X11 preferences so you can see all the windows you have open at once
- and they all (including the xterm on the target) show up in entourage.
Tim Cutts wrote:
On 9 Nov 2004, at 1:30 pm, Kenneth Klein wrote:
Well, I was thinking I had unsubscribed in
my sleep. Glad some people still participate.
I still can't get X windows to work on my iMac. I get a gray screen
with an xterm in it,
Which is correct. That's what it does.
but I am expecting to see the entire AIX
desktop with the DOC at the bottom, or SYSTRAY - whatever you want to
call it.
You'll never get that. That requires an XDMCP session managed by your
AIX machine. The Apple X server doesn't support XDMCP sessions, as far
as I am aware. XDMCP is an obsolete way of managing remote X sessions
these days - it isn't secure.
I'm reading an into to X on
http://www.strath.ac.uk/CC/Courses/oldXC/section3_4.html to learn if I
am just going about it all the wrong way. Do I run startx? xinit? wmw?
What should be running on the AIX box? Should my iMac have
$DISPLAY=:0.0 or 128.163.13.216:0 ??
:0.0 is more efficient, and also works when you don't have a network
working.
I have followed all of Tim's instructions
for my .ssh/config file, the AIX sshd_config file and even put his
script code in my .bashrc.
I thought I had it working at one time, but then I think we installed
SSL/SSH and it worked no more. This p570 is brand new in this shop, I'm
fairly new to AIX and OS X.
I think you're confused between the three completely different ways of
running X.
I shall try to explain. Details of the following may be simplistic
and/or inaccurate, but they should give you the idea.
1) startx
In the beginning on traditional UNIX boxes, was startx (or possibly
xinit - these were both obsolete even by the time I started using X 10
years ago)
startx would fire up your X server locally, and then launch some
clients (in your .xinitrc file) to manage your session.
In these trusting old days, you used xhost to authorise other machines
to access your display. But the point is that your local machine
managed your session.
2) X terminals
But then people started to get clever, and said "Why not make a thin
client machine which just runs an X server and nothing else - all the
hard work can be done by our big iron"
So they invented the program xdm (X display manager). X terminals (or
some X server programs like Exceed) use a protocol called XDMCP to talk
to the xdm process running on the big machine. The xdm gives them a
graphical login, and then starts a session on the big machine, starting
clients from your .xsession script on that machine.
Security is managed by an xauth cookie, kept in your .Xauthority
database. But this only manages the security of accessing the display
at all - the data is still sent in the clear.
The difference here is that all of the X clients are run on some
machine other than on your X server. All the X server does it display
the output, and take input.
3) SSH tunnels
X terminals rather fell out of favour. They weren't very powerful, and
couldn't do anything else. PCs were cheaper, and more meaty. Not
using the network made most X clients a lot faster too. Many
traditional UNIX systems, and Linux, still use the xdm program to
manage the X session that's running on their console, but they don't
tend to listen to the network for other X servers.
You can treat this setup as though it were an X terminal, or you can
start xterms locally, and use SSH tunnels to securely encrypt X client
data from other machines.
Apple)
Apple went for a solution which is much more like the original startx
setup, although it uses some of the features of the XDMCP method.
Firstly, it starts the X server, as a passive X server just like startx
used to do. It can also generate an xauth cookie, if configured to do
so. It then runs some clients locally on your Mac (the quartz-wm
window manager and an xterm, by default, which is what you've seen).
The default setup does not initiate a connection of any sort to another
machine. It cannot use XDMCP to start a CDE session or whatever on
another UNIX box. The idea is that since you already have a desktop
and all that good stuff from Apple using Aqua, why would you want some
old barbaric CDE desktop from a traditional UNIX as well?!
You can use the ssh method that I told you about to log into your AIX
box, and run X clients, but you won't be starting a complete AIX
session like you used to. It's a different way of working, and to be
honest I prefer it now that I have got used to it. It's more secure,
and it allows you to use Apple and X11 applications side by side.
Tim
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