Can't get X11 to work in macOS Big Sur

Question

I am new to macOS. I had set up everything for accessing my AWS EC2 Ubuntu instance before the update to latest macOS Big Sur.

Now when I try to ssh to AWS EC2 instance:

ssh -X -i /location/key/pair.pem user@server

I am connected.

# Start a virtual display:
/usr/bin/Xvfb :0 -ac -screen 0 1024x768x24 &
# Output: [1] 2146

# Start the x11 server
/usr/bin/x11vnc -ncache 10 -ncache_cr -viewpasswd remote_view_only_pass -passwd some_pass123  -display :0 -forever -shared -logappend /var/log/x11vnc.log -bg -noipv6
# Output: PORT=5900

# Try out a xeyes
DISPLAY=:0 xeyes &

#Output: [2] 2156

No xeyes displayed on the screen.

I am not sure what exactly might be wrong here. I have tried -L switch, -Y.

I went into the /etc/ssh/ssh_config and the uncommented lines are:

Host *
    ForwardAgent yes
    ForwardX11 yes

How do I check where the problem might be?

Answer 1

This is a common issue since for X Windows you need to run a server process on your Mac and the xeyes client process runs in AWS (or the client program could run locally on your Mac). By default macOS doesn’t ship a X11 server so you would need to load and run that for your setup to work.

https://www.xquartz.org/releases/index.html