Question

I am on a Windows7 machine and I’m trying to get firefox to open on the centOS machine, but be displayed on my current screen.
When typing firefox in terminal, I am getting the following error:

Error: cannot open display: localhost:0.0

To setup the display I used the command

$ export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0

Some site suggested using the following, but it didn’t work either:

$ export DISPLAY=:0.0

I am using PuTTY and I have the Enable X11 forwarding check box checked and XMing is running on Windows. Additionally, the sshd_config on centOS file seems to be setup properly as well:

$ cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config |grep -i x11
#X11Forwarding no
X11Forwarding yes
#X11DisplayOffset 10
X11UseLocalhost yes

I’ve looked over numerous pages and searched StackOverflow as well, but none have managed to help me in any way.
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

So, it turns out that X11 wasn’t actually installed on the centOS. There didn’t seem to be any indication anywhere of it not being installed. I did the following command and now firefox opens:

yum groupinstall 'X Window System' 

Hope this answer will help others that are confused 🙂