Overcoming cygwin “Error: no display specified”
I installed cygwin, which allows you to execute Linux-based applications on your Windows machines. But what I wanted to do was connect (using ssh) to a Linux box and run an application that has a GUI from there. In this case, I wanted to be able to connect to server and run firefox from the server. This would enable me to download some files to the server, etc.
When I ssh’d into the machine:
ssh me@server.edu
And then tried to start firefox:
firefox &
I got the following error:
Error: no display specified
In searching around, the solution I found was that you have to enable X11 Forwarding. A simple way to do this is to specify the -X parameter when you ssh into the server:
ssh -X me@server.edu
Then when you try to open firefox, it should work:
firefox &