How to get apps to work on remote X displays?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-05-16, Miºu Moldovan <dumol at gnome.ro> wrote:
> Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> a scris:
> [snip]
>>
>> I don't often need to run X apps remotely -- it's just sad to
>> know that you can no longer do it.  It was always one of the
>> things that one could point to as an advantage of X11 over
>> MS-Windows.
>
> That's ridiculous... I frequently start GTK+ apps remotely,
> most of the time in a 100M LAN, but also over my Internet
> connection. The only time I really *feel* the difference is
> when I open files in a picture viewer. Granted, playing movies
> is also problematic, but not impossible. That's usually
> between three workstations with Debian Sarge (gtk 2.6), Etch
> (gtk 2.8) and Gentoo 2007.0 (gtk 2.10).
>
> I would recommend the "-Y" switch over the "-X" one, see the
> ssh(1) man page for details.

<-=boggle=->

Using -Y instead of -X makes a _huge_ difference!

Thunar starts up in 5 seconds instead of 2 minutes, and GUI
interaction is a bit sluggish, but quite usable.  Using -X
you'd wait at least a minute after clicking on an object before
it was highlighted.

I was aware of -Y, but the description in the documention gives
no indication that it makes a 20X difference in speed. Using -X
must force Xlib into synchronous mode or something.

> In the times when my Internet connection was limited to 128
> kbps (that's 16 kB/s, folks) I was also using the "-C" switch,
> which enables compression, preferably with "-c blowfish" for a
> faster cypher specification.

Yup, I always use blowfish.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! I just forgot my whole
                                  at               philosophy of life!!!
                               visi.com