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Version 11 (modified by Antoine Martin, 7 years ago) (diff)
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FAQ

General

Why this fork?

This fork started in order to provide features needed to work with winswitch and grew from there.

Which version shall I be using?

Please always used the latest released version, you can see the last revision tagged here, or look for the last source release here.

Issues - known problems

Xpra crashed! Can I recover my session?

Generally yes, as long as the virtual display server (vfb) has not crashed. If the xpra server is completely gone, you can start a new one with "xpra start --use-display" to re-use the existing display. If it is still running but unresponsive, you may have to kill it first (use kill -9 to prevent the tear down code from stopping the display)

Pasting from the clipboard is slow

Please make sure that you are not running a clipboard manager which may interfere with xpra's clipboard synchronization code (ie: klipper is known to cause such problems)

I cannot click on menus

If you are using Qt/KDE, this is known bug which has been fixed so you will need up to date Qt/KDE libraries, see the platforms section below

I cannot use Xpra with NFS home

Use the socket-dir option to place Xpra's log files and sockets in a location that is not NFS mounted (ie: /tmp/)

Features - How do I…

How do I use notifications forwarding?

System notifications use dbus, so you must start the xpra server within its own dbus session, ie: "dbus-launch xpra start ..." (see dbus-launch for details). This is one of the things that winswitch does for you.

How do I forward a full desktop (ala VNC) instead of individual applications?

Use Xephyr, simply start the xpra server with Xephyr as a child and start a window manager (ie: fluxbox, or a full desktop environment like gnome or KDE) on the Xephyr display:

xpra start --start-child="Xephyr :200 -ac -screen 800x600" :100
DISPLAY=:200 fluxbox&

Note: you must chose a separate display number for Xephyr. If Xephyr is not available on your system, you can also use Xnest.

How do I use mmap with different users?

Please see the --mmap-group option: the two users need to be in the same group, the mmap file created by the client will use the group-id of the server socket file. You must generally also use the --socket-dir option to place the socket in a location which is available to both users (ie: /tmp)

How do I enable OpenGL or other X11 extensions?

Please see Xdummy

How do I theme my application?

That depends on the application. GTK2 applications can be themed by setting the GTK2_RC_FILES environment variable, ie:

GTK2_RC_FILES=/path/to/gtkrc YourCommand

Warnings and Messages

"No OpenGL_accelerate module loaded"

You can safely ignore this warning, it only means that some OpenGL operations won't be accelerated.

"Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display" and "Randr not supported: X server does not support required extension Randr"

The virtual framebuffer (typically Xvfb) does not support Randr, this may cause some display problems, try using Xdummy instead

"cannot register our notification forwarder ..."

The xpra server was started from a GUI session which already had a dbus instance and a notification daemon, notifications forwarding will not work. See "How do I use notifications forwarding" (above)

"Uh-oh, our size doesn't fit window sizing constraints .."

This means that xpra failed to create a window matching the desired constraints, you may experience display artifacts around the window's borders

"Xorg is not readable"

Your distribution ships Xorg suid but it is not readable by your current user, since Xpra needs to run Xorg non-suid, it needs to make a non-suid copy of the file so you will have to make it readable (please complain to your distributor - there is nothing we can do about this and the security beneffits of preventing read access to a suid binary are dubious at best in most cases).
For more details, see Xdummy.

SSH connection error "The system cannot find the file specified":

Error running ssh program \
    '['ssh', '-T', 'HOSTNAME', '.xpra/run-xpra', '_proxy', ':10']': \
    [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified}}}"

This means that the user you login as on the server has never had an xpra server running. You must be using the wrong username or even the wrong server.

I get a GPG error: KEYEXPIRED 1273837137

The key had expired. Try re-importing the updated key. On Debian you may have to delete the key (apt-key -d) before adding it again.

Platforms

Does Xpra work with Windows, Mac OS X, Android?

Some platforms have known limitations: limited clipboard support on Windows, no clipboard support on Mac OS X, no soft keyboard input on Android, etc. If you find a bug or missing feature, please do let us know.

There is no system tray with gnome shell

Please complain to gnome for breaking things. There are extensions you can use to restore the system tray area. (topicons is one)

Some applications crash or do not start at all.

This can either be a bug in xpra or some application configuration issue. For example see #435: gnome-terminal may need --disable-factory. Bugs can be fixed, misbehaving applications.. not so much.

My application menus are missing on Ubuntu

This breakage was caused by Ubuntu's global menus hack, start your applications with UBUNTU_MENUPROXY set to an empty string to disable this mess (ie: UBUNTU_MENUPROXY="" yourapplication)