What is ssh X11 Forwarding?

[evac-q8r]

What is ssh X11 Forwarding? Just a basic or general ideal of what it does. From what I here it sounds pretty interesting.

Thanks,

EVAC

[scinerd]

what it does is forward X windows from the remote machine to your lacal machine. For example on my cups printer server I can ssh in and then type Kups which is the gui and the windows opens on my local machine. It can be a little slow but it's nice.

[ehawk]

I can use any antique computer (166 MHz, 64 MB RAM) and ssh into a much faster machine on the same network to run intense, number crunching programs, symbolic computing programs, and run applications which appear only on later distributions, which wouldn't run well on the old stuff, without having to bother installing individual apps. Most of the time, the fast computers sit idle, so it's much easier to find old computers people are throwing away, put them in your office, and use them as a gateway to power.

[carrja99]

I've used this alot, but recently I switched to Debian and now I can't seem to do any X11 forwarding at all.. the display just wont open. I'm using the current GTK toolkit and Qt3 whaterver, so it's kind of odd...

For those interested, the server has RH 7.3 installed out of the box on it, and I'm running Debian Sid.