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This is a long story. I use an old OSX 10.4.11 machine (Power PC) as a web server. Very low use. It runs X11 at 1.1.3 (XFree86 4.4.0).

For several years I used X-forwarding to show log traffic on a newer Mac Intel machine (Mac mini). At some point after about 2006 this just stopped working. I have never tried to upgrade the 10.4.11 machine as it met and continues to meet my needs for a low cost Web server.

Meantime XQuartz has come and been through several new versions, as has MacOS. Currently I have MacOS 10.13.6 and XQuartz 2.7.11 on the Mac Mini. I am revisiting why the long-defunct X-forwarding sessions to OSX 10.4.11 stopped working.

I find I can do X-forwarding fine from my Linux 18.04 box, which was a surprise. I have spent a lot of time trying various approaches to resolving the issue. It occurs to me that the 10.4.11 setup may just be too old, and therefore incompatible. Hence my question: "mac osx 10.4.11 with x11 1.1.3 (XFree86 4.4.0) - is this compatible to do X-forwarding from Mac OS 10.13.6?".

Any comments will be much appreciated.

cooker47
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1 Answers1

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I am answering my own question.

I spent several days looking at logs from ssh -v -X user@hostname, with -vv and -vvv for more log info. I also tried the ssh -Y variants of that command.

Reading extensively from stackexchange and elsewhere, I restored and re-edited the ssh_config and sshd_config files on both server and client hosts several times, and coded shell scripts to restart sshd.

The insurmountable problem was that $DISPLAY was not being set up correctly on the client. This is what led to my question.

The only way I could get X-forwarding to work with my OSX 10.4.11 PPC client was:

1) ssh -f user@hostname /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm then 2) run my local commands on the client from that window (nsu and nsu-go).

I also had to add the correct path to all my commands, including /usr/X11R6/bin for xterm as above, and ~/bin to my commands on the client.

The package I was working with was https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsu/ where detail changes are required.

cooker47
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