ARCHIVED: At IU, on Quarry, how do I use remote X Window applications?

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Note: After seven years of production service, Indiana University's Quarry research computing cluster was decommissioned January 30, 2015. IU students, faculty, and staff can request accounts on Karst, IU's newest high-throughput computing cluster; for instructions, see ARCHIVED: Requesting an account. User data on Quarry has not be removed; you can access your old home directory data on Quarry from your account on any other IU research computing resource (see Available access to allocated and short-term storage capacity on IU's research systems). All software modules that were available on Quarry are available on Karst. If you have questions or concerns about Quarry's retirement, or need help, contact the High Performance Systems group.

If you are logged into Quarry at Indiana University, you can use SSH or SSH2 to start remote X Window applications, such as xemacs or xv.

To start an X Window application, at the Unix shell prompt, enter:

  ssh -X -f hostname command

Replace hostname with the name of the remote host, and command with the name of the application. For example, to start xcalc on Quarry, enter:

  ssh -X -f quarry.uits.indiana.edu /usr/bin/xclock

Note: On Quarry, the X user applications are in /usr/bin.

If you have not set up public key authentication, you will be asked for your password on the remote host. If you have set up public key authentication, you will be asked for your private key password.

Note: These instructions assume you are using OpenSSH, and are trying to run an X11 program remotely. If you receive an error about -X not being an option, try leaving it out or replacing it with +x (i.e., ssh +x -f host command).