Enable X11 Forwarding

There are a few changes needed on the virtual machine to enable X11 forwarding. In this tutorial we use Ubuntu 18.04 or above. Other Linux distributions will have a very similar SSH daemon configuration. The SSH daemon configuration file is located at /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

1. Open the SSH daemon configuration file.

    $ sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
   

2. Locate and uncomment or change line X11Forwarding to be X11Forwarding yes. This line allows the graphical application to be forwarded over to your computer.

    X11Forwarding yes
   

3. Restart SSH daemon.

    $ service sshd restart
   

4. Install the graphical application xclock for testing. For Ubuntu or Debian, xclock is included in the x11-apps package, and can be installed as follows:

    $ apt -y install x11-apps
   

   For RHEL, CentOS and Fedora, the package name is xorg-x11-apps and you should install it using either yum or dnf, depending on the distro.