Adam Retter

Blog

Ponderings of a kind

This is my own personal blog, each article is an XML document and the code powering it is hand cranked in XQuery and XSLT. It is fairly simple and has evolved only as I have needed additional functionality. I plan to Open Source the code once it is a bit more mature, however if you would like a copy in the meantime drop me a line.

Connecting to OpenIndiana by XDMCP

Enabling XDMCP in OpenIndiana

I have a small NAS which I have built which run's OpenIndiana oi_151 and I wanted to be able to headlessly administer it, whilst I have SSH and thats all I really need, sometimes its nice to use a remote desktop environment.

XDMCP is a fundamental part of the X Window System, and one feature it offers is the ability to export your display across a network.

To enable XDMCP on OpenIndiana simply modify the XDMCP section in the file /etc/gdm/custom.conf so that it looks something like this -

# GDM configuration storage

[daemon]

[security]

[xdmcp]
Enable=true

[greeter]

[chooser]

[debug]

Now you just need to restart the GDM service -

$ sudo svcadm restart gdm

Thats all there is to it!

Testing the XDMCP Connection

To connect to the XDMCP server, you need an X Server for your client machine, for Windows you can use Xming, or if you are on a Linux/Unix like platform you could use Xephyr, Xvfb, Xnest or similar. Personally im on MacOSX and Xephyr works very well for me -