Right so Mika sorted my wlan and I've cured a sound defect myself. There is no urgency whatsoever in this, but I'll ask out of curiosity.
The last nuisance puzzling me is X11 forwarding inside my simple home lan. Sounds silly perhaps but I'm just learning how to network for myself. I can X11 forward from my secure shell account based in London: Thus
user@laptop$ ssh -fX moss@mythic-beasts.com xclock
gives me an xclock. This tells me that at least my Xserver and ssh on the laptop must be configured right for X11 forwarding. The home lan is simply the laptop a wireless router BTVOYAGER2110 and my trusty old Pentium II PC. The PII is wired into the router so communication between the laptop and the PII is through the router. There is no longer a monitor connected to the PII.
user@laptop$ ssh -fX user@PII xclock
gives "Error: Can't open display:" followed by a blank line. ssh has failed to set the environmental variable $DISPLAY. It is exactly the same if I put a wire directly between PII and the laptop and configure a static network. The laptop is running grml-2008.11 with apt pointed at Lenny but the PII run grml-1.0 pointed at Etch.
user@laptop$ ssh -Xvvv user@PII
gives this output after accepting the password
debug2: x11_get_proto: /usr/bin/X11/xauth list :0.0 2>/dev/null debug1: Requesting X11 forwarding with authentication spoofing. debug2: channel 0: request x11-req confirm 0 debug2: client_session2_setup: id 0 debug2: channel 0: request pty-req confirm 1 debug3: tty_make_modes: ospeed 38400 debug3: tty_make_modes: ispeed 38400 debug1: Sending environment.
There is then a long list of env ignored including the display
user@PII$ echo $DISPLAY Gives a blank output.
user@PII$ export DISPLAY=:10 # This is poor practice as it can obviate # encryption but I tried it anyhow as # I'm only at home. user@PII$ xclock &
and the xclock shows up in htop but it does not display on the laptop. So the basic problem is that ssh is not setting the display though it ought to. I must have a misconfiguration somewhere on the PII. .ssh/config reads thus
Host * # I know this in not secure. ForwardAgent yes ForwardX11 yes AllowTcpForwarding yes