dochawk

ok, record time for answering my own question. google just caught an update in my search, and the answer is that the "xauth" package must be installed on armbian. with that done, exiting the session, reconnecting, running"ssh -X" and setting DISPLAY to "mymac.local:0" gives me my X connection.

I am trying to connect to my armbian install (on an orange pi 4 LTS) from OSX (with Xquartz) to run the mythtv backend setup. I didn't install the desktop version of armbian; just the base version, and with the image for this model of pi. connecting by SSH is not a problem, I happily get through. The problem is, both with the -X and -Y options, I can't forward X successfully. DISPLAY doesn't get passed. On the Mac side, it's variously ":0" or something like "/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.Cvf3IlZ6rM/org.xquartz:0" (which would have no meaning to another machine). I've set to :0 , :0.0 , mymac.local:0 (after entering the ip in /etc/hosts). I've used scp to transfer the .Xauthority file, and also to delete at armbian end. I've used "/opt/X11/bin/xhost + mythbackend" and the reckless "/opt/X11/bin/xhost +" In pretty much every combination, I get "xterm: Xt error: Can't open display: 10.0.1.11:0" or similar when trying to launch. (when I set to mymac.local:0 it takes a couple of minutes before the similar message). on the armbian, I've altered /etc/ssh/ssh_d to add "ForwardX11 yes". Am I missing something? 25 years ago, I was blithely running into computer labs wherever I was and using terminals to connect to the box on my desk. It's kind of frustrating to fail across the family room! any ideas as to what I'm missing?

FWIW, I've found that armbian-install, booting off the SD armbian system, will copy over to the EMMC--but still isn't bootable. Theres's another option to rewrite the boot loader for "SD/EMMC", but I'm really not sure which/how it will target, so I won't touch that until I find someone who knows it better. I'm toying with the idea of somehow writing a different linux over the bootable armbian SD, but I haven't figured quite how. In your case, that might lead to getting the workable pi SD, and then copying a live ubuntu over?