How to properly setup X forwarding on (Ubuntu) linux?

Question

From my desktop, I can get to my wife's machine on the lan using: ssh -X [email protected]. Both systems are running the desktop flavour of Ubuntu 9.10-64bit.

But here is the problem: When I try to run X apps like gedit, it fails with the following error message on the remote end of the ssh connection: "X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication".

The strange thing is, if I run the app with "sudo" such as "sudo gedit" then everything works fine: I get the X application forwarded through my ssh connection and showing up on my desktop, even though it is actually running on the remote machine.

What have I missed, or where do I check to see exactly what permission failure is giving me problems when running as non-sudo?

Solution

Uncomment the below in /etc/ssh/ssh_config on both machines.

ForwardX11 yes
ForwardX11Trusted no

Comments

[Stéphane]

That makes perfect sense. This remote box has a ssh_config file based on a Debian 5 example instead of the usual Ubuntu one. Thanks.