How-to Run an X11 application

Owned by Rob Yelle (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Oct 07, 2020 by Mark Allen
1 min read

A wrapper script has been created to run X11 applications, called idev (interactive-development), or nicknamed xrun.  This has been installed into /usr/local/bin on login and compute nodes.

To use it, do the following steps:

  1. Install an X11 server on your desktop or laptop, e.g. "Xming" on Windows, or "XQuartz" on MacOS. 
  2. SSH to one of the Talapas login nodes (talapas-ln1.uoregon.edu) with X11 forwarding enabled:
    1. If using the Putty SSH client on Windows, make sure that the X11 forwarding box is checked.
    2. If using MacOS or Linux, connect using ssh -Y
  3. Once on a Talapas login node, you have two options available, xrun or srun.
    1. DEPRECATED: Using xrun, you can pass many of the same arguments to xrun as you can to srun.
    2. Using srun, use the --x11 flag (available in the Slurm 17.11 module)
  4. Launch your X11 application, e.g. type xclock


# I believe this is deprecated.  Use srun instead.
xrun -N1 -n1 --time=02:00:00
srun -A hpcrcf -N1 -n1 --time=02:00:00 --x11 --pty bash -i