Xhost: Unable To Open Display

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When I put export DISPLAY=”IP address:0.0″ ip address being my windows8 desktop

then xhost +

I get xhost: unable to open display “IP:0.0”

when I try export DISPLAY=”:0.0″
I get the same thing.

I have CentOS6.4 running on a late model Dell Blade Windows8 Alienware laptop

I checked the xwin firewall setting and it is set to public network access (but strangely private network is grayed out)
any ideas

5 thoughts on - Xhost: Unable To Open Display

  • You running doing the xhost + on the Win8 box and the export DISPLAY on the Linux side, right?

  • There is no xhost command on the windows side…. I have not done this in two years, but as I remember it, the xhost + was done on the console and the export DISPLAY was done in the user profile. It is the UNIX box exporting the display to allow windows (or another UNIX box) to receive it.

    What am I missing.

  • I have a Win8 box with Cygwin’s XWin Server. I launch it and in the terminal window that opens I do the xhost + command.

    Then I logon to the AIX/Linux host via telnet/ssh client from my windows box and do the export DISPLAY=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:0.0 command. Then if I run anx-based app (like xclock) from the Win8 box it displays fine on the Win8
    box.

    Or am I misunderstanding something?

  • with the definitions of ‘an X server is the machine controlling your display/showing you the desktop’ and client being ‘some machine that wants to run processes which then show their graphical output to some other location’, you want to run
    ‘host +’ (although it should really be something more like ‘xhost + hostname’) on the server and run
    ‘export display=somemachine:somenumber(s)’ on the client.

    or better yet, run SSH -X user@hostname and let SSH tunnel it for you.

  • Even better, install x2goserver from EPEL on the CentOS side and the windows client on windows, and aside from the connection being set up for you, you will be able to disconnect/reconnect to running sessions.