I often log into a remote SSH terminal to use an ipython shell. In doing so, it is necessary for me look at figures invoked by matplotlib as I am exploring and analysing data. For this, I have comfortably been using a combination of screen and xpra. However, I recently hesitantly upgraded my Ubuntu distribution from 14.04 Trusty Tahr to 16.04 Xenial Xerus. And with all upgrades, I expected minor breakages. Little did I realise that it would break xpra and interrupt my workflow sending me down a rabbit hole internet trawling for solutions. Turns out it is a known issue on on launchpad but the discussion has not been active for a while and the provided solutions were incomprehensible to a lay user. It appears that simply updating xpra to the latest version resolves the issue.
TL;DR
Log into the report server:
ssh -Y username@remote
On the remote server, update to the latest stable release of xpra which at the time of writing this was 2.0-r15319-1. The update instructions which were not so obvious to find are as follows:
# Administrator privileges
sudo su -
# Import the packager's key:
apt-get install curl
curl http://winswitch.org/gpg.asc | apt-key add -
# Xenial Xerus (16.04)
echo "deb http://winswitch.org/ xenial main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winswitch.list;
apt-get install software-properties-common >& /dev/null;
add-apt-repository universe >& /dev/null;
apt-get update;
apt-get install winswitch
Now start an xpra server and attach to the session inside a screen session:
xpra start :10
xpra attach :10
Press Ctrl+a, d to detach from the screen session. Now run the following on a separate screen session which should launch a beautiful empty plot on your client.
DISPLAY=:10 ipython --pylab -c 'plot()'
Going down the rabbit-hole
To replicate the problem on a vanilla installation of Ubuntu 16.04 with the default installation of xpra version 0.15.8+dfsg-1 amd64 at the time of writing this blog:
ssh -Y username@remote
xpra start :10
I tried to create a plot() as usual in ipython shell with pylab module using the default Qt4Agg backend:
DISPLAY=:10 ipython --pylab -c 'plot()'
Which generated the following error:
: cannot connect to X server :10
I inspected the content of my log by running cat ~/.xpra/:10.log:
/usr/lib/xorg/Xorg.wrap: Only console users are allowed to run the X server
2017-03-15 15:03:37,413
2017-03-15 15:03:37,413 Xvfb command has terminated! xpra cannot continue
2017-03-15 15:03:37,413
I found these discussions to change allowed_user=console to allowed_users=anybody by running sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg-legacy for a GUI interface or alternatively by running the following sed command on bash:
sudo sed -i 's/allowed_users=console/allowed_users=anybody/' /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
Now when I ran xpra start :10, noticed that my plot() function still was not working. I inspected the log using cat ~/.xpra/:10.log again and saw the following:
~/.xpra/IT050339-10 is not responding, waiting for it to timeout before clearing it.(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) The '-logfile' option cannot be used with elevated privileges.
(EE)
(EE)
Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support
at http://wiki.x.org
for help.
(EE)
....
2017-03-15 13:15:38,963
2017-03-15 13:15:38,963 Xvfb command has terminated! xpra cannot continue
2017-03-15 13:15:38,963
2017-03-15 13:15:38,963 removing socket /home/bk12369/.xpra/IT050339-10
I thought I would try launching xpra as a superuser so I ran sudo xpra start :10. When I inspected the log this time using cat ~/.xpra/:10.log, this is what I saw:
X.Org X Server 1.18.4
Release Date: 2016-07-19
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux 4.4.0-45-generic x86_64 Ubuntu
Current Operating System: Linux IT050339 4.4.0-66-generic #87-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 3 15:29:05 UTC 2017 x86_64
Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-4.4.0-66-generic root=UUID=51981f04-c04d-4b55-a28d-31f545fa32b7 ro quiet splash
Build Date: 02 November 2016 10:06:10PM
xorg-server 2:1.18.4-0ubuntu0.2 (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support)
Current version of pixman: 0.33.6
Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
to make sure that you have the latest version.
Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(++) Log file: "/home/bk12369/.xpra/Xorg.:10.log", Time: Wed Mar 15 15:30:37 2017
(++) Using config file: "/etc/xpra/xorg.conf"
(==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d"
This was what I initially expected to see but when I ran DISPLAY=:10 ipython --pylab -c 'plot(), it still refused to work by producing the following error:
No protocol specified
: cannot connect to X server :10
Note that this is slightly different to earlier since it recognises that there is an open port but still struggling to connect. Next, I found that changing the permission for ~/.Xauthority enabled me to query all the current sessions as follows:
sudo chown $USER:$USER ~/.Xauthority
xauth list | grep `uname -n`
Which returned:
IT050339/unix:10 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 e65eee56adec473c9a04c74e2089f8b7
This allowed me to run DISPLAY=:10 ipython --pylab -c 'plot() without any errors. However, I was still unable to attach to the session using xpra attach :10.
This is when I decided to update xpra to the latest branch as per the instructions provided in TL;DR which took a great difficulty to find which resolved everything.
Lesson learnt
Persevere and keep trying new things.