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Given a setup of a headless Linux box running on a network, but having Xorg installed, and having various other machines on the network capable of using SSH with X-forwarding to connect to that box, and have X11 apps run on the local machine, I have an interesting question.

I'm familiar with using 'screen' to encapsulate an SSH session such that I can detach and reattach to it from a different machine, and while detached, processes continue to run, and when I reattach, I can scroll back through the buffer and see what was output.

Is the same thing possible for X11 apps? I ran into the situation where I wanted to run wireshark for some time to do some packet sniffing, but while it was running, I needed to switch computers, but realized there was no way that I knew to 'disconnect' from the wireshark thread, while still leaving it running, and in a state that I could reconnect to it at a later time (perhaps from a different machine) through another SSH session. Is there a similar process to the 'screen' disconnect/reconnect that can be done with X11 apps that are forwarded to a remote machine?

4 Answers 4

3

VNC will do this for you. It's the Unix version of remote desktop.

14

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpra sounds more like what you want to do than VNC..

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  • Xpra looks like a clever utility, though I see it's not part of the Gentoo portage tree, so for my particular situation I'll go with VLC for now and try this in the future. Jan 18, 2010 at 14:13
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    +1! I just set this up (well WinSwitch) on an Ubuntu server with an OS X client. It does exactly what I want!
    – kbyrd
    Dec 29, 2010 at 21:08
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Other things that let you suspend and resume remote X sessions would include:

  • Exceed onDemand (popular in the corporate / education worlds)
  • NoMachine NX / the free wrapper for their GPL libraries, freeNX / Google's 'neatX' NX server
2

Have you tried shifter?

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