We're actually using X2Go - an OSS continuation of FreeNX as far as I can tell. No more going to nomachine.com at all - they have their own clients you can download etc. It works pretty well once you install the fonts manually into the embedded xserver or point to a local xserver with the fonts installed (this is on Windows. I think the other platforms already have the fonts)...

I tried XRDP here, and had nothing but weirdness, which is too bad as RDP wouldn't be a bad solution. But X2Go client is really slick - you can have it run a whole desktop, you can have it run a specific app, and you can have it use rdesktop to proxy an rdp connection to a Windows computer if you don't want to set up VPN or an RDP gateway server for that... I'm really impressed with the flexibility.

Also, once you get the client set up on Windows - you can easily zip the entire program files folder and then pass it around to run anywhere without installing, which is also nice!
--
James Pulver
CLASSE Computer Group
Cornell University


-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Sommerseth
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2014 7:29 AM
To: Yasha Karant; Scientific Linux Users
Subject: Re: ssh -X xinit failure

On 07/05/14 04:33, Yasha Karant wrote:
> Thanks for the information.  At my institution, we were told by the 
> university network security group that after ssh -X, one still needed 
> to "activate" X for the session by xinit or the like for security reasons.
> Evidently, the persons were thinking of some other environment (MS 
> Windows perhaps?).  Indeed, xeyes and firefox both work fine from the 
> remote host to the local client workstation.
> 
> A question:  as a regular X window manager desktop from the remote 
> machine is not displayed (that is, the pull down menu "Applications"
> under Gnome or the equivalent from KDE), is there any mechanism to get 
> such a menu, etc., displayed?  What is the default GUI file manager 
> (that allows an end user to "point and click" on an executable file to 
> execute the application) that can be invoked from a remote terminal?

Running this over ssh will most likely not work well at all.  If you want a remote desktop experience, look into nomachine or freenx:

<https://www.nomachine.com/>
<http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/FreeNX>

Another alternative is to start Xvnc and tunnel the VNC port Xvnc establishes from your remote server via SSH.  Then use a local VNC client to connect to the same port.  This may work, but may also be worse than nomachine.

Using anything else, will most likely just cause grief and frustration.
 The X11 protocol isn't easily tunnelled, and requires quite some stable bandwidth to work decent.


--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth