Open Graphical Application For Another User Via SSH

Question

I apologize if this question has been asked before, but I don't really know the vocabulary to be able to do the research myself.

Say I have a Linux machine (Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi in my case) hooked up to a monitor. If I had a mouse plugged into this machine, I could double click on, say, Scratch, and have it open and be visible on that monitor.

Now say I don't have a mouse hooked up to it, but I am able to SSH into it from another machine. How would I launch a program in that same way? In other words, I don't want to launch it in the SSH window, and I don't want it X11 forwarded to me. I want it launched on that machine, visible on that monitor, as if I had double clicked it.

Hope my question was clear, but I'd be happy to clarify if anyone is confused!

balwa · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-03 00:12:35Z

1

Find out the correct environment.. One of the ways of doing that is issuing w on your ssh-terminal:

USER     TTY      FROM             LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
user1   tty7     :0               15:49   12:56   1.90s  0.01s gdm-session-wor
user1   pts/0    :0.0             15:50    8:11   0.17s  0.70s gnome-terminal
user1   pts/1    tbpc             15:54    0.00s  0.08s  0.00s w

Now mostly it would be :0 for you. From your ssh terminal issue:

env DISPLAY=:0 command

So in case you want to launch firefox:

env DISPLAY=:0 firefox&

answered Feb 3, 2014 at 0:12

balwa

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2 Comments

Jake Over a year ago

The user that's logged in is the same as the user that I'm SSH-ing with. When I run the W command via SSH, I see only one user, and under "From", it lists the 'sending' IP address. I don't see anything with :0 in it.

balwa Over a year ago

can you install finger and see if finger <user> returns all the logins. Also try who command and see if all the logged in users are visible. I also had one more idea of solving this. If you are in the same network you can also use synergy-foss.org

amcn · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-02 23:24:18Z

0

Log in to the server using the -X option like so: ssh -X [email protected]. This will require the ssh on the server to have been configured to allow X11 forwarding.

answered Feb 2, 2014 at 23:24

amcn

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2 Comments

Jake Over a year ago

This is the reverse of what I'm going for - I don't want to use X11 forwarding to open something on my computer from the linux computer, I want to launch something on the linux computer from my computer. In other words, if I had a mouse plugged into the Linux box, I could double click something and launch a GUI on that machine. From another machine, I can SSH into my Linux box, but now I want to launch, say, an image viewer, on that Linux box (and not on my local machine)

amcn Over a year ago

Ah, apologies. For your case I believe balwa's answer is probably the one you are looking for.

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