virtualbox.org

I have been developing Python software on a Linux guest running on a Mac laptop. I have been trying out a debugger that I heard about, and I found out that it uses X Windows for display.

I know almost nothing about X Windows, so I'm not sure what I need to do to make X Windows-based applications run from within a Linux guest. When I tried to run the debugger, it displayed a message that said "Unable to access the X Display, is $DISPLAY set properly?" After reading a few things, I wondered if the way it is supposed to work is that I need to make sure that an X Windows server is running on my Mac and that I have sshed into the Linux guest with the -X option to allow X11 forwarding and appropriate X11 settings in the ssh_config and sshd_config files. I tried that, and DISPLAY is now defined as localhost:10.0 in the guest. Now I get four messages saying "X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication." along with the message about the DISPLAY variable. Do I have the basic understanding right about how the guest and host are supposed to work together as X11 client and server and I just need to make sure some configuration details are correct, or am I misunderstanding how it's supposed to work from beginning to end?
Thanks,
Mo

Just to close this out, I figured out how to fix this problem after some searching. The most common solutions given in various forums around the net are to make sure that the right X11 settings are stored in the ssh_config and sshd_config files on the client and server and to make sure that your .Xauthority file has your own user name and group assigned as owner. Neither of these fixed my problem. Eventually I found a page that said to delete the .Xauthority-c and .Xauthority-l files. When I did this everything worked correctly.