Question

I’m trying to ssh into a server and run a python script on it.

I keep getting the error when I run the command on a mac.

File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 443, in clf
gcf().clf()
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 369, in gcf
return figure()
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 343, in figure
**kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/matplotlib/backends/backend_tkagg.py", line 80, in            new_figure_manager
  window = Tk.Tk()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 1688, in __init__
  self.tk = _tkinter.create(screenName, baseName, className, interactive, wantobjects, useTk, sync, use)
  _tkinter.TclError: no display name and no $DISPLAY environment variable

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I’m using ssh -X [e-mail] to ssh. This works without any problem on ubuntu but gives this error on mac. I have just shifted to mac and I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong here.

Answer 1

Do you have XQuartz installed? $DISPLAY should be automatically set on OS X to a launchd socket which will automatically launch XQuartz when accessed. A common mistake is setting $DISPLAY to :0.0, but I think that would cause a different error.

Here’s how things should look:

% echo $DISPLAY
/tmp/launch-k9XueA/org.macosforge.xquartz:0