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Showing posts from April, 2006

Solving XPlanner's $DISPLAY issues on a headless Linux (Debian) server

A month or so ago at work we started playing around with XPlanner , a project planning and tracking tool for eXtreme Programming (XP) teams. I downloaded it to my Ubuntu workstation, unzipped it and ran startup_xplanner.sh . Everything worked fine, all the graphs displayed, all the reports, etc. We then decided that we would start to use it seriously and so it needed moving to a central server. This is when our problems started. We started to get errors such as: java.lang.InternalError: Can't connect to X11 window server using ':0.0' as the value of the DISPLAY variable. at sun.awt.X11GraphicsEnvironment.initDisplay(Native Method) . This was due to XPlanner now running on a headless server but it requires the Java AWT graphics libraries to draw the graphs. These in turn use the underlying system's X server, which requires some kind of X server running. After some investigation I found Xvfb , an X server virtual framebuffer which will happily run on a headless se