SSH Tunneling X Windows on Mac OSX

Installing X11

Depending on the version of OSX and the type of of installation, X11 might not be installed.

If you have OSX 10.4, X11 is on the installation disk. Alternatively, X11 can be downloaded from Apple Apple X11 .

Opening X11

To open X11 once installed, select Go on the top toolbar and choose Utilities from the drop down menu.
Click on the X11 icon.
From the X11 toolbar, select Applications and then Terminal from the drop down menu.

Tunneling Over SSH

Type ssh -X cs.toronto.edu -l your_username. The -X flag is for tunneling X.

Run an X application like xeyes to test if it works.

OpenSSH 3.8 and Above

If you are using OSX 10.4 with OpenSSH 3.8 and having difficulties, try the following:

If you are using OpenSSH 3.8 or higher and having difficulties, try the following:

The -X flag has changed in OpenSSH 3.8 and later. By default now X11 forwarding applications run as untrusted clients. This may cause error messages with some applications.

To use X11 applications as trusted clients, use the ssh -Y flag instead of ssh -X.