Running graphical commands on a remote machine

If you attempt to run a command on a remote machine that uses a graphical window, you will see an error similar to cannot open display. This is because the ssh shell is attempting (and failing) to connect to the X server on the remote machine.

How to do it...

To run an graphical application on a remote server, you need to set the $DISPLAY variable to force the application to connect to the X server on your local machine:

ssh user@host "export DISPLAY=:0 ; command1; command2""" 

This will launch the graphical output on the remote machine.

If you want to show the graphical output on your local machine, use SSH's X11 forwarding option:

ssh -X user@host "command1; command2" 

This will...