How do I start a blank x-server?

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012, Micha wrote about "How do I start a blank x-server?":
>     <p>For a project I'm working on at the moment, I need to be able to
>       log in remotely to a machine (via ssh) and start a blank x-server.
>...
>       I seem to recall that just running X as a user used to do it, up
>       to the no cursor part, leaving an empty (hetched) screen and
>       running the content of .xsession or something like that.<br>
>       Things on modern systems seems to have changed enough with all the
>       xsession / gdm / gnome etc. that it doesn't seem to happen
>       properly.</p>
>     <p>Any idea how I can achieve that on a modern system (red hat
>       enterprise desktop 6 in this case).</p>


I'm not sure about RHEL6, but Fedora, which is probably similar,
unfortunately lost the ability to run the user's ~/.xsession instead of
those fancy (and bloated) GNOME/KDE. It happened when Fedora 9 was
released, in 2008.

Luckily, there's a way to bring the good-old-behavior of following a
~/.xsession (if it exists). You can enable it by doing:

	yum install xorg-x11-xinit-session

Then, in the graphical login screen, you get a third option besides KDE
and Gnome, which is "user config" (or something like that) - and if you
choose that, your ~/.xsession is used.
If you only switch to this "user config" once in the login screen, it
will be the default next time, so from there on you will just log in
normally, and always get your intended configuration.

But although this answers your question, looking at the rest of your
discussion, I'm not sure this is what you actually wanted to do. Perhaps
what you wanted is simply to run "vncserver" and get a blank X server which
you can view with "vncviewer".

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                   Tuesday, Feb 28 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A thing is not necessarily true because a
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |man dies for it. - Oscar Wilde