X windows and NeXTStep have the capability to display on a machine other than the one where they are executing. A good reason for such a thing is if you have a heavy computation that does alot of number crunching _and_ requires complex graphic display, the program will run nearly twice as fast if you do the numbers on machine A and have it tell machine B to draw the graphics. This facility is built in to nearly every X or NeXT graphically-oriented application. ********************************* * Remote display with X windows * ********************************* The key item is the argument to the X program -display chico:0.0 This tells the X client that even though it computes here, it will draw on screen 0 of the host "chico". An example is: xterm -display chico:0.0 Problems may arise if the display of chico does not want to have visitors. You will usually get an error like "Unable to open display". The remedy is to go ot chico and run "xhost +". This disables access control to chico's display. A way to get around having to type the display argument each time you run an X command is to set the DISPLAY environment variable. Then, every X program you run will know where to display. In the c shell: setenv DISPLAY chico:0.0 In the bourne shell (/bin/sh): DISPLAY=chico:0.0 export DISPLAY ******************************** * Remote display with NeXTStep * ******************************** Here, the key ingredient is to append the argument: -NXHost host to your command. For example: /LocalApps/Tetris -NXHost isaac Will start a game of Tetris on Dr. Dollard's display (You might want to check with him first). Problems might arise if the current user (hopefully you) of the display does not have their preferences set right. The important one is the "Public Window Server" option. It must be set to True for this to work. You can change this with /NextApps/Preferences.