Running gui apps as other user

[Magnus Therning]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 05:51:35PM -0400, Todd Slater wrote:
>My wife and I share a machine and sometimes one of us wants to run an
>app without logging the other person out. Normally we'd do "su - user"
>and type the command to run the app, but Ubuntu (Hoary) doesn't let us;
>we always get the error "cannot open display".
>
>I read something about xhost +127.0.0.1 but I did this and got the same
>error.
>
>Ideas?

You need two things:

 1. Set up DISPLAY properly.
 2. Have permission to use the display.

The following should work:

 $ xhost +
 $ su - <user>
 $ export DISPLAY=:0.0
 $ <program>

You might want to read up on xhost since the way above opens up the
display for anyone who can log in on your computer.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://magnus.therning.org/

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