Xservers, TUIs, and GUIs, oh no!

Today I learned something fun. This applies to other distros and such, but it was done, yet again, on OpenSolaris. When you ssh into the box in question, if you're coming from a Unix/Linux/BSD/Solaris box with xserver running, use ssh -X. Then you can run GUIs which appear locally.

$ssh -X theunixblog.blogspot.com

theunixblog$/usr/local/gui-install

The GUI interface for installing will show up where you're connecting from. This is useful for when you have a VM with little to no resources. You boot into the text console, get the ip information, and then start the ssh daemon. On OpenSolaris this is

$pfexec svcadm enable ssh

or

#svcadm enable ssh

Then, connect into the text only box from a GUI unix interface, and run the /usr/local/gui-install and BAM you're doing a GUI install and not using up resources you don't have on the new box.