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My virt-manager was working just fine and all of a sudden stopped working, throwing in error: RuntimeError: could not open display

root@rakcal ~]# echo $DISPLAY
localhost:10.0

[root@rakcal ~]# virt-manager 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager.py", line 383, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager.py", line 286, in main
    raise gtk_error
RuntimeError: could not open display

Has anyone seen this before? the same thing happen to "virt-viewer" as well:

[root@rakcal ~]# virt-viewer winxp1
Cannot open display: 
Run 'virt-viewer --help' to see a full list of available command line options

Does anyone know what might be the problem or if I'm missing anything? Reinstalling "virt-manager" didn't bring any good. Any help would be appreciated. Cheers!!

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  • 1
    Did you run this in a remote ssh shell, without X forwarding? does the server have X installed?
    – dyasny
    Mar 30, 2012 at 17:39
  • 1
    I certainly didn't do it without X forwarding; otherwise echo $DISPLAY wouldn't return anything. There is no need to install full X on the server, only xauth (with associated dependencies installed) will work just fine. In fact, it worked just fine for for 4/5 days until yesterday morning; since then it started giving trouble. Cheers!!
    – MacUsers
    Mar 30, 2012 at 19:26
  • then I'd start looking at the logs for libvirt (libvirt.log and libvirtd.log) and track back the changes recently made to the system
    – dyasny
    Mar 31, 2012 at 5:28
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    Do any X programs work? Absent a full X install, maybe you can install something like xeyes or xdpyinfo. The idea here is to figure out if this is a problem with virt-viewer or with the underlying X forwarding.
    – larsks
    Mar 31, 2012 at 13:20

1 Answer 1

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If you use ssh X forwarding try:

ssh -Y user@remotehost virt-manager

From SSH manpage:

-Y Enables trusted X11 forwarding. Trusted X11 forwardings are not subjected to the X11 SECURITY extension controls.

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