Xterm to Graphical Environment: run what?
 

Hi Folks,

I've successfully made an xterm connection from my Windoze PC to my Fedora Linux box and the X-Server is all started and running (it's even forwarding over SSH); now what I'm looking at on the X-Server display is a terminal session. I can start individual programs (like, say, xclock) by just running them.

Isn't there a way to start up a Gnome (or other) X11 enviroment inside the X-Server session?

When I log in directly on the console, it drops me into Gnome. So, where do I look to find out what the startup sequence is to launch the X11 environment when I log in via the console (or am I barking up the wrong tree, here)?

(I hope this was an appropriate forum for this kind of question. I'm certainly feeling like a newbie at the moment and I'm hoping that answer's not Fedora-specific.)

Thanks for any suggestions.

John

what windows software are you using? eXceed? Xwin32? normally there's an option on the main menu to choose a full desktop session.

alternatively, if you're after a full emersion experience, you might get a quicker cheaper resul by usign VNC, which now can plug directly into X to export your main login, or a traditional setup where you can create your own personal login for the windows machine.

The product I'm using is LabF's WinAxe+ and I use it all the time on my LAN here with an XDMCP setup. It works great.

But, for working with a client, I need to be able to use SSH forwarding (or some other secure means of connecting to some Unix boxes that may or may not have the usual Linux capabilities). They do run X on them, so I'm just trying to wring this process out here in my own little LAN and hope it'll work on their boxes too. LabF's instructions for using their XServer via SSH are to start the XServer, then use their SSH-enabled Telnet program to connect via SSH and indicate that you want X Forwarding enabled. At that point, you run
xterm -display <your box's IP>:0.0 &

And you end up with a terminal session in the XServer window. At which point you can run specific programs--presumably you could also run other things rather than xterm. (LabF's uninteresting, but illustrative example is xclock; it works fine.) So, if I can start anything, it seemed to me that I should be able to run Gnome or KDE; but I don't know what the sequence is to start them.... So, I was hoping there'd be a script somewhere that runs when I normally connect on the console that starts Gnome; I don't know where to look for it (and, perhaps there isn't one and that's not how it works). Or perhaps I could just find the names of the programs and run them and see what setup issues they complain about.

Using SSH forwarding is ideal for this situation in terms of (apparent) simplicity of firewall settings at my customer's site and providing good security. However, I'd like to be able to run graphical programs. So, if there's no slick way to get the full X11 GUI going inside the X-Server, then perhaps I can find some useful programs (like the Nautilus file manager). xclock (my only example so far) is in /usr/X11R6/bin, but there's nothing with a name like "nautilus".... So, is there a place in the X configuration where there's an association between the entries on the Applications menu and the programs? (There is, I know, can you help me find it?)

Thanks,

John

The command:

gnome-session

seems to be the magic executable that you need to run. It probably should have some parameters to go with it, but even without anything it gets the full environment up and going (when I'm hitting RedHat EWS at least). Now to test it over the Internet.....

Thanks for taking time to read this!

John