X Forwarding Firefox - Do I need a desktop environment?

[till]

I just got SSH X forwarding working on with my VPS. I installed Firefox and tried to open a remote instance of it, but it failed. Do I need to have Gnome or KDE installed to forward Firefox?

[DanL@VPSLink]

Yes, you will need to have xterm and Gnome or KDE to make use of X11 forwarding over SSH.

Correction: See Lyle's post below

If you have a Link-4 plan (or better) on the Xen platform you may want to test-drive our Ubuntu 8.10 FreeNX template (particularly useful if you want a cross-platform compatible interface to remotely access an Ubuntu Gnome desktop).

[Lyle@VPSlink]

I just got SSH X forwarding working on with my VPS. I installed Firefox and tried to open a remote instance of it, but it failed. Do I need to have Gnome or KDE installed to forward Firefox?

Do you have an X server running on your local computer? Have you enabled X client connections from your servers IP to your local X server instance with xhost? (type 'man xhost') You do NOT need a full Gnome/KDE/XFCE install on either server or client. As long as your local X server accepts client requests from your server, and you SSH to your server with the '-X' option (type 'man ssh'), commands run in this SSH session (that would otherwise spawn an X application on the server) will be tunneled back to your client PC's X server for display.

[GuyPatterson]

I installed Firefox and tried to open a remote instance of it, but it failed.

An error message of some kind usually helps with troubleshooting these types of issues. Can you elaborate on, "but it failed"?

-Guy