piping to X display

teethlikelions · #1 28th February 2006, 05:02 PM

this may sound a little dumb, but...

if i'm SSHed onto my FC4 box from another location, and a user is on my computer
ie:

Quote:

[matt@artax ssh]$ who
matt pts/1 Feb 28 10:51 (xxx.xxxxxxx.edu)
jeanine :0 Feb 28 11:15

could i pipe a command from my terminal prompt to her X-display?

like

Quote:

[matt@artax ssh]$ gedit | :0

or something?
obviously that doesn't work, but essentially, i want to send the 'gedit' command to her desktop, openning gedit.

code_astronomer · #2 28th February 2006, 05:22 PM

EDIT: *snip*
sorry...I read your message wrong.

I don't think it's possible to open an application on someone elses display. It would be a bit of a security issue.

teethlikelions · #3 28th February 2006, 05:31 PM

even from root?

code_astronomer · #4 28th February 2006, 05:42 PM

I'm pretty sure it's not possible.
You can send messages, but I am unaware of any method of opening an application on someone elses screen.

I can think of a messy way to do it, but it would require a script, a cron job or similar for the user whos display you want it to appear on and the creation of a file for the script to look for.

Perhaps someone more experienced knows a better way, if there is one.

Shakes · #5 28th February 2006, 05:50 PM

what about if u exported ur display to her machine? Is she connected locally or from netowrk?

I don't know much about this, except that it's been done to me on Solaris, which I'm assuming for something like this involving X etc is gonna be quite similar.

brahms · #6 28th February 2006, 06:35 PM

It's very possible.

Code:

gedit --display=0:0

--display is a standard GTK+ option.

brahms · #7 28th February 2006, 06:38 PM

Or something like this:

Code:

DISPLAY=:0.0 zenity --info --text="Hello Jeanine"

code_astronomer · #8 28th February 2006, 06:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brahms

It's very possible.

Code:

gedit --display=0:0

cool ... I didn't know that was possible

You learn something new everyday

teethlikelions · #9 28th February 2006, 08:37 PM

man, i love these boards.

thanks for the input folks

teethlikelions · #10 28th February 2006, 08:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by code_astronomer

You can send messages, but I am unaware of any method of opening an application on someone elses screen.

what kind of messages do you mean?
how do you work that?

code_astronomer · #11 1st March 2006, 12:11 AM

wall, talk, write.
wall sends messages to all terminals. you can also use talk to chat over the terminal and write sends messages too.

I didn't know you could direct something to someone elses display...really cool trick

teethlikelions · #12 2nd March 2006, 02:34 PM

a warning to those interested:

i was trying wall, talk, and write, and in using talk and doing a little research on it i found that it need `talkd,` so i tried to install a version of the outdated daemon, and in installing its dependencies (ld.so, libc.so.5, etc) i seem to have overwritten some important dependencies for X, effectively destroying my X server.

i tried to resinstall the newer working versions, but yum encountered some problem with these overwritten dependencies too, and i eventually had to reinstall.

(thankgod for backups!)

code_astronomer · #13 2nd March 2006, 05:37 PM

blimey. I never had anything problems using wall. It was installed when I installed Fedora (Don't remember having to add it at all). I don't have talkd. I installed it the other day but removed it.

Did you not use yum to install the talk daemon?

teethlikelions · #14 2nd March 2006, 08:12 PM

it's not on liva or anything. i guess since it's out-dated. i didn't have any problems with the other prorams, just installing talkd.

i guess i fiddle around a bit too often and too recklessly sometimes