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cellularmitosis

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 6, 2010
188
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I made this post from a PowerPC Mac :)

You can run a modern browser on a remote Linux box and have its display rendered locally on your PowerPC Mac via the X11 protocol.

(I don't know why trying this never occurred to me before!)

The experience is pretty slow on an iMac G3 600MHz, but if you need compatibility with the modern web, this is one way to achieve it.

On your Mac, start the X11 app and start an xterm.

In that xterm, use xhost to add the remote host to the list of machines which are allowed to connect using X11. For me, that's:

Code:
xhost +opti9020

If you don't run DNS for your local network, that might be an IP address instead:

Code:
xhost +192.168.1.3

Alternatively, you can just allow any host to connect:

Code:
xhost +

The "xhost" command might not be in your $PATH by default. On Tiger, run:

Code:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin

Log into the remote Linux machine, set the DISPLAY env var, then start Firefox or Chromium with the "--display" option. (Here, imacg3 is my Mac, and opti9020 is the Linux box).

Code:
ssh opti9020
export DISPLAY=imacg3:0.0
firefox --display=imacg3:0.0
chromium --display=imacg3:0.0

or use IP addresses (here, 192.168.1.2 is your Mac, 192.168.1.3 is the Linux box):

Code:
ssh 192.168.1.3
export DISPLAY=192.168.1.2:0.0
firefox --display=192.168.1.2:0.0
chromium --display=192.168.1.2:0.0

Chromium seems to be a bit faster than Firefox (I guess it uses the X11 protocol more efficiently), but unfortunately renders everything in blue.

Note: it is also possible to do X11 "forwarding" over SSH, but the encryption overhead makes it much slower than using the raw X11 protocol.
 
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This screenshot is actually a bit of a lie: when I tried to attach a file in Chromium, it locked up, and I had to make the post using Firefox instead.

It does show the strange blue issue with Chromium though.
 

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I made this post from a PowerPC Mac :)

You can run a modern browser on a remote Linux box and have its display rendered locally on your PowerPC Mac via the X11 protocol.

(I don't know why trying this never occurred to me before!)

The experience is pretty slow on an iMac G3 600MHz, but if you need compatibility with the modern web, this is one way to achieve it.

On your Mac, start the X11 app and start an xterm.

In that xterm, use xhost to add the remote host to the list of machines which are allowed to connect using X11. For me, that's:

Code:
xhost +opti9020

If you don't run DNS for your local network, that might be an IP address instead:

Code:
xhost +192.168.1.3

Alternatively, you can just allow any host to connect:

Code:
xhost +

The "xhost" command might not be in your $PATH by default. On Tiger, run:

Code:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin

Log into the remote Linux machine, set the DISPLAY env var, then start Firefox or Chromium with the "--display" option. (Here, imacg3 is my Mac, and opti9020 is the Linux box).

Code:
ssh opti9020
export DISPLAY=imacg3:0.0
firefox --display=imacg3:0.0
chromium --display=imacg3:0.0

or use IP addresses (here, 192.168.1.2 is your Mac, 192.168.1.3 is the Linux box):

Code:
ssh 192.168.1.3
export DISPLAY=192.168.1.2:0.0
firefox --display=192.168.1.2:0.0
chromium --display=192.168.1.2:0.0

Chromium seems to be a bit faster than Firefox (I guess it uses the X11 protocol more efficiently), but unfortunately renders everything in blue.

Note: it is also possible to do X11 "forwarding" over SSH, but the encryption overhead makes it much slower than using the raw X11 protocol.

Will it work from another Mac (with a newer browser) instead of Linux?
 
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Will it work from another Mac (with a newer browser) instead of Linux?
No. Only programs that use X11 for their GUI will be able to send the graphics directives across the network to a remote X11 server. This was quite useful many years ago where you could use one machine to do the computational lifting and a different machine, perhaps with a better graphics system, to do the display.
Actually, NextStep (with Display PostScript) had this ability as well...
 
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No. Only programs that use X11 for their GUI will be able to send the graphics directives across the network to a remote X11 server. This was quite useful many years ago where you could use one machine to do the computational lifting and a different machine, perhaps with a better graphics system, to do the display.
Actually, NextStep (with Display PostScript) had this ability as well...

There are a lot of apps that run on macOS and use X11 for their GUI. It’s probably just browsers are broken (though WebKitGTK should be fixable, at least on x86).
 
There are a lot of apps that run on macOS and use X11 for their GUI. It’s probably just browsers are broken (though WebKitGTK should be fixable, at least on x86).
Sure - anything that lives in /opt/X11, of course. But virtually every 'macOS' programmer uses Cocoa and its successors for the GUI interface of their programs. Would certainly be nice if someone could take some Linux version of Firefox that uses X11 (versus Wayland) and get it to compile on a PPC Mac - though if critical parts of Firefox are built using Rust, that would be a problem...
 
Sure - anything that lives in /opt/X11, of course. But virtually every 'macOS' programmer uses Cocoa and its successors for the GUI interface of their programs. Would certainly be nice if someone could take some Linux version of Firefox that uses X11 (versus Wayland) and get it to compile on a PPC Mac - though if critical parts of Firefox are built using Rust, that would be a problem...

I have fixed compiling Palemoon with GTK backend, but it does not work LOL
Though possibly same issue as with the native build (so if that is fixed, GTK might work too).
 
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