# Local dev Server X11 Forwarding

This SSH Client software comes with an XServer Built in For windows install MobaXTerm

X11 forwarding is a mechanism that allows a user to start up remote applications but forward the application display to your local Windows machine. The url's are not always available remotely so to get past this you can run Firefox with X11 forwarding

mkdir /srv/tools
wget -O- "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest-ssl&os=linux64&lang=en-US" | tar -jx -C /srv/tools/

Create a symlink to a newly downloaded /srv/tools/firefox/firefox executable.

ln -s /srv/tools/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Start the latest Firefox browser from GUI menu or by executing the firefox command.

firefox

Open MobaXTerm and Create Open new Tab, Then manually open a new SSH connection to your server but with the -X directive

Check the server's sshd_config (normally /etc/ssh/sshd_config), and make sure X11Forwarding option is enabled with the line

X11Forwarding yes

Allow clients to connect from any host using xhost+

Execute the following command to disable the access control, by which you can allow clients to connect from any host.

xhost +

If X11Forwarding is not specified, the default is no on the Debian machines I have available to check.

ssh -X user@server-id

# Set environment variable for display
export DISPLAY="localhost:0.0"
firefox

It might give you some errors the first time, but then just close the process and try again, a Linux looking windows should pop up out of nowhere... You are now running a Local Browser on the Centos 8 Server but viewing the window in windows, thanks to X11 Forwarding

If firefox gives you driver problems, try installing google-chrome

yum install google-chrome

And execute the following command to run chrome with min settings to open even if there are some issues with the drivers

google-chrome --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer --no-sandbox