Richard Rauch wrote:
>
> When starting X applications on the remote, they seem to start and go to
> sleep without establishing a display.
> 
> The remote DISPLAY variable gets set to <remote>:<display>, where <remote>
> is the remote machine's ID, and <display> is a pseudo-display number for
> X forwarding (e.g., 10.0).

Hmmm, have you configured the local machine to allow X connections from
the remote?  I don't use ssh for forwarding, because I don't usually
want forwarding, but...  If you haven't setup the local machine to
accept X connections from the remote, that's probably the problem. 
Check out man/info xauth.

I don't know exactly what you want to do there, but you could also setup
the remote machine to serve an xdm login to the local machine and just
push the entire display over the net, ie the local machine is too
slow/low on ram to run much itself(if the network is fast enough for
you).  Check out /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xaccess and probably man/info
xdm.  You also have to add a different line to Xservers in the xdm
directory on the remote, and configure the local machine to connect to
the remote xdm.  You could probably do something similar with other
display managers (if they're as cool as xdm  :).

-- 

John Merriam
john@icculus.net