Opening X windows; DISPLAY variable on MAC OS

[lyonsd]

I was wonder if anybody could help me out here.

I am on a MAC:

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$ uname -a
Darwin thorin.physast.uga.edu 8.11.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1: Wed Oct 10 18:23:28 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.25.20~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386

And I'm fairly new to MACs, but I'm not new to Linux/unix.

Anyway, I'm trying to open X apps from a command line terminal window, like /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm for example.

Now the DISPLAY variable doesn't appear to be set:

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$ echo $DISPLAY

$

If I set it:

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$ export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0

or

$ export DISPLAY=128.192.19.118:0.0

or

$ export DISPLAY=:0.0

or even if I leave it unset, I can't get anything to open the display:

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$ xhost +
xhost:  unable to open display ""

How do I get X windows to open on my display in this OS? Thanks.

[jcornez]

An X server is not running by default in Mac OS X, but you can install it and then start it.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/a ... acosx.html

Note that is for Mac OS X 10.3 If you have 10.4 or newer, it is on the OSX install DVD (and the page says this...)

[grobian]

It's in the Utilities, X11. Leopard should have some turbo magic here that automagically launches X11 once an app tries to write to its display, but I haven't tested that ever myself.