X11 Forwarding and .htaccess

[SpaceAdmiral]

I have a questions that I think will be simple for any of you experienced linux users to answer. Please help me if you can.

I want to use X11 Forwarding with my VPS. I have putty and xwin32 on my home XP machine and the line "X11Forwarding yes" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config on my VPS.

I start xwin32 and then use putty (with "enable x11 forwarding" checked) to log in. When I type "vi &" or "bash &", I can see the program is running (using 'ps'), but I don't get a new window so I can access the program.

Do you have any idea what I need to do?

[SpaceAdmiral]

Whoops. Sorry for mentioning htaccess in the subject. That has nothing to do with my problem. (Originally I also had a question about htaccess, but I figured that one out before posting).

[ekerin]

vi and bash don't use X11 at all, they are both command line programs.

If you want a terminal window, you want to run xterm (or similar), and that will open you a X window with a shell. As long as you have the X libraries installed on your VPS, and have X forwarding working correctly.

Although one thing to remember, X11 can be slow over high latency links, so depending on how far you are from your VPS, your experience could be good, or really poor. It's much better to learn to use the command line for managing your VPS, or install something like webmin.

[retep]

Tip: check you have xauth installed. e.g. apt-get install XFree86-xauth

Also, after you have logged into the VPS if your run "export | grep DISPLAY" you should get a value there (confirming x forwarding is working).

Just this weekend X forwarding really saved the day for me. My 10 year old dell monitor quit on me (complete with electrical arcing and smoke). I needed to use Tomcat and Eclipse. But the 1GB memory footprint they required was too much for my laptop. But using X forwarding I was able to run apps on my desktop and have the UIs come up on the laptop. Very handy.