DISPLAY Environment Variable

The $DISPLAY environment variable tells X clients where to contact your X server. Unlike most X solutions which set the $DISPLAY variable to point to your JavaStation, GO-Joe sets this variable to point to an alternate display on your host machine. For example, if your host is named "workstation" and the JavaStation is named "smile," you might expect the $DISPLAY variable to use smile:0 as its value. However, GO-Joe uses the hostname for its $DISPLAY variable value, in this case, workstation:1.

GO-Joe makes an additional optimization that can be somewhat confusing. In X parlance, if the $DISPLAY variable is set to unix:# the JavaStation client will attempt to connect using a local transport. For example, instead of using TCP/IP, it will connect using a named pipe. This connection is faster than using TCP/IP for JavaStation clients running on the same host. However, the unix:# value cannot be used if you run clients from different hosts.

Instead, use the following shell script to change the $DISPLAY variable to point to the hostname of your machine. This can be included in .profile file:

DISPLAY=`/bin/uname -n``expr $DISPLAY : `[^:]*\(:.*\)'`

This translates $DISPLAY from, for example, unix:3 to workstation:3 allowing X clients on other machines to successfully contact the GlobalHost loadable ddx module on the workstation host.