Electronics

X Forwarding with the Rasperry Pi

This article shows hot to use your Raspberry Pi in a remote fashion from another linux machine by forwarding the display of the X Server.

2 Min. Lesezeit

You can use the installed applications on your Rasperry Pi without the need of installing a VNC server or another Remote Desktop tool. Everything is already there - right out of the box.

The name of the game: X-Screen forwarding

Prequisites

  • Installed Raspiban
  • Enabled SSH Server on the Raspberry
  • A SSH Client that is able to display a forwarded X-Window.

Howto

The first step is to conenct to your rasperry via SSH. The important option is the ‘-X’. This requests X forwarding to the client (which is enabled by default at the raspiban ssh server).

user@linuxbox:~$ ssh -X pi@raspicam
pi@raspicam's password: 
Linux rasperry 3.12.22+ #691 PREEMPT Wed Jun 18 18:29:58 BST 2014 armv6l
.
.
.

From now on you can start every program on your raspberry by simply writing the name into the ssh shell. IF the program has a graphical representation the window will be forwarded to your screen and blends into your linux desktop. In this case i started mathematica remotely - with success! (Dont expect too much speed in mathematica since it is still executed on the rasperry)

mathematica_on_pi.png

If you want to have the menubar of the pi on your desktop (which simplifies program starts) you start it like that:

pi@rasperry ~ $ lxpanel &
[1] 2734

As you may have guessed: lxpanel is the panel itself and the & operator at the end starts the program in the background (so that you can use the shell while lxpanel is still running). The number *2734 *is the process id of lxpanel.

rasperry_lxpanel.png

If you want to close it then just kill its process on the pi:

pi@rasperry ~ $ kill -9 2734