Skip to Content
Author's profile photo Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo

Redirect xWindow display

Some times we haven’t access with root user directly to a server and we need execute su – to scale up to root. When we do we lose X connection but we can perform the following steps to run applications XWindow:

1.- Connect to server and list enviroment variables and xauth

Connecting to 172.1.195.38:22…

Connection established.

To escape to local shell, press ‘Ctrl+Alt+]’.

Last login: Mon May 23 11:22:22 2016 from 10.152.214.37

johnd@JohnD-Server1:~> echo $DISPLAY

localhost:10.0

johnd@JohnD-Server1:~> xauth list $DISPLAY

JohnD-Server1/unix:10  MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1  70a56a2cb6e8d74cfefc29c1b6186efb


2.- Change to root user:

johnd@JohnD-Server1:~> sudo su –

3.- Set the variable and xauth

JohnD-Server1:~ # export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0

JohnD-Server1:~ # xauth add JohnD-Server1/unix:10 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 70a56a2cb6e8d74cfefc29c1b6186efb


Enjoy it

Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo

Assigned Tags

      2 Comments
      You must be Logged on to comment or reply to a post.
      Author's profile photo Nelis Lamprecht
      Nelis Lamprecht

      Just a tip for the above post. You can also use the following command as root to add the "magic cookie" from a X user:

      xauth merge ~user/.Xauthority

      Less work 😉

      Regards,

      Nelis

      Author's profile photo Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo
      Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you very much for your reply

      Regards

      Juan de la Cruz Arellano Royo