Remote X11 Connection

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

> Today, I was wanting to edit some remote files on my university's data
> server. I used the following command to connect:
>
> ssh -Y ...
>
> I noticed though on connecting and using emacs to open the required file
> the GUI of the server (which uses KDE) was loaded not my local GUI (Gnome)
> with the data of the file imported.

What exactly do you mean here ? emacs does not uses gnome or KDE.

what you did was log on to the remote server and run emacs there, on that box. 
ssh was simply forwarding the X window back through the remote connection, to 
be displayed on your machine. Your machine was not really doing any else 
other than this.

I guess what you mean is the emacs window you get from your remote 
server 'looks' different in some way to the one you get when running locally. 
This could be due to any number of reasons, like a different emacs version 
(in Fedora7 for instance a new version is used which does look quite 
different to most other distros which have an older one), or just what you 
have in your ~/.emacs file on either system.

>
> I was wondering if anyone knew how to configure ssh or X11 so that my
> local GUI is loaded and remote data is imported.

Again guessing, what I think you are asking is how to start an emacs session 
on your local machine, but give it access to the data on the remote server ? 
if so, then you need to set up some way to make the files on the remote 
server accessible to your local machine (connecting via ssh does not do this, 
you are simply logged on to the remote machine directly.)

one way, which I use to do exactly this and works nicely is to use sshfs - a 
fuse based userland file system which lets you mount remote filesystems via 
ssh. you can install it via

 > yum install fuse-sshfs

googling for sshfs will bring up loads of sites explaining how to use it, but 
this is as good as any

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS

note - one gotcha is you will need to add your local user to the fuse group on 
your machine, in order to be allow to run fusermount

cheers Chris

>
> Thanks for all your help.
>
> All the best.
>
> Cheers,
> Tony Crouch