on X in the modern world
Having used X for going on twenty years, I thought I’d just be checking out a cool retrospective when this article came out. For the most part I was right until we got to the nested X server stuff and the VNC stuff.
I’ve know about ssh’s ability to forward X windows stuff for a while (check out the -X -C options, and the -L option as well). What I didn’t know is that you can run Xnest to actually fire up an X session from the remote machine to your local machine.
The howto on that starts around page 8 of the article. Well worth checking out even for old-timey UNIX folks.
update
Turns out there’s an even better ssh option as described here. This fixed up some minor font thingies that weren’t working before.