[mythtv-users] remote-controlled mythfrontend?

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2005 17:35:10 -0500
    From: Chris Ribe <chrisribe at gmail.com>

    Out of curiosity, what is your goal here?

[See my next reply (to Kuphal).]

    If you don't need the myth interface, something along the lines of typing
    "mplayer filename" should get the job done.

That's a fascinating idea.  I'm not sure it'll work, though.  I'm
displaying the output via the TVout of a PVR-350, and I'm not sure
that the frontend isn't holding the card in some weird state that
would prevent something else from streaming an mpeg to its decoder,
which was why I wanted to do it through the frontend itself.  If that
doesn't matter, then that makes life easier.

But I can't test it, because I have a second problem:  I just noticed
that I can't seem to get anything X to work remotely on the frontend.
I'm ssh'ed in, and of course ssh sets DISPLAY to its own forwarded
connection, so I have to change that or everything will just display
back on my desktop where I'm typing.  If I try "export DISPLAY=:0.0"
then even trivial things like xterm say ``Xlib: connection to ":0.0"
refused by server'' and ``Xlib: No protocol specified''; thinking that
this is a permissions problem, I tried "xhost +" and got the same
error, so it's clearly having troubles connecting to the server.

Replacing ":0.0" with "localhost:0.0" changes xhost's behavior:
now it pauses for a few seconds (trying a reverse lookup that's
failing? I dunno) and then claims ``xhost: unable to open display
"localhost:0.0"''.

X -is- running on the frontend, of course:  The logfile claims it is,
and mythfrontend is running, and (before I made the mythtv user start
it up automatically), I was presented with the standard X login screen
that Ubuntu provides; I can see mythfrontend running from under gdm in
my process table.  (I see "/usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 [etc]" in ps, and I did
try just ":0" and that didn't change anything, either.)

On the other hand, if I try ssh'ing from desktop machine A to machine
B, doing "export DISPLAY=:0.0", and then trying an xterm, without even
"xhost +", an xterm pops up on B as expected.  Yet this doesn't work
at all if I try it to the Myth frontend machine.  (And they're all
running Ubuntu Breezy.) 

So I'm obviously missing something dumb...