Hi,

I'm trying to setup a network of X terminals. Since this is intended to be used in an untrusted environment, communications between terminals and the application server are made through SSH with X forwarding.
At the moment, the server is my main computer, running Fedora 4, and the other one has a minimal linux ; its only graphical software is the Xorg server.
When starting a remote gnome session (spawning gnome-session from the ssh shell), the main problem is that the splash screen hangs at launching the window manager. The X server reports that a window manager is already affected to the display, although I have renamed .xinitrc and /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc (I launch X with xinit and a custom frontend to ssh as the client).

Do you know how I could solve ? Do I have to install gnome's window manager locally ?


Thanks for your help.


Julien

I don't think you can start a desktop environment or window manager on X remotely (what's the point? you already have one running locally). I think for what you want to do you can use VNC or FreeNX to display the desktop remotely.

Actually for gnome I'm pretty sure it can be launched remotely. I just tried to do it with knoppix (which doesn't have gnome) and it is running right now. The problem must come from the configuration of my terminal, since knoppix certainly doesn't have metacity (gnome's WM) either.
Having gnome run remotely is definitely better than vnc to have network-transparent X terminals.