Re: [SLUG] running X11 app through Apache

[Julio Cesar Ody <julioody@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the answers so far!

Yeah, it's a bizarre idea. But fact is that I need to perform an
operation using OpenOffice.org, and even if you run with the
"-invisible" parameter, it still requires that you have a Xserver,
which in my humble opinion, is a lame idea. The script will run a
macro on the command line, and bail out right after.

I've set the display variable to point to my xserver's IP address. You
can even specify it as a parameter. Works fine if you run it through
the shell. I disabled my Xserver's access controls just to make sure
I'm getting it right, and when I run the script, I do get an error
message on my screen, saying OpenOffice could not run, and that's it.
AFAIK, there's no error logs.

So I figure I should try to run, say, Firefox through the same script
to see what happens. I tried, and Firefox didn't run. No error
messages, no logs, nothing. Just didn't run. Then I realized I was not
being able to run anything that requires X11 through it.

PHP has a memory limit parameter, in php.ini. It's value has to be
enough to fit the memory allocated in RAM for the application being
called from inside the script. As a desperate measure, I put it to
200MB allowed, to make SURE it could fit OO.org. Well, nothing
changed, so I assume that's not the point.

So that's exactly where I am now. MAYBE it's something related to the
enviroment variables. It would be odd if it is, because I tried to run
it from a clean enviroment via shell, and it worked just fine, but I'm
still considering the possibility.

Any help is appreciated.





On 5/2/05, telford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <telford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 03:57:46PM +1000, Julio Cesar Ody wrote:
> > I tried to run a few GUI (X11) applications to run through my
> > webserver, but no success so far. They simply don't run, and no error
> > appear in any of my logs. Does anybody know how to do it?
> 
> X11 apps need a DISPLAY variable set in the environment and it has
> to be a valid X11 display and the program (running as apache) needs
> suitable permissions. You can probably get something working by getting
> the web server to build a DISPLAY environment variable from the client
> IP address and then using the "xhost" at the other end to open up
> permissions. The result would be kind of ugly, well very ugly
> actually, but it could work.
> 
>         - Tel  ( http://bespoke.homelinux.net/ )
> --
> SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
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> 


-- 
Julio C. Ody
http://www.livejournal.com/users/julioody/