PuTTY bug x11-local-display-broken

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summary: X11 forwarding to implicitly specified local display broken
class: bug: This is clearly an actual problem we want fixed.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: high: This should be fixed in the next release.
absent-in: 0.55
present-in: 0.56
fixed-in: 2004-11-19 0.57 (0.58) (0.59) (0.60)

In PuTTY and Plink 0.56, X11 forwarding would not work if the local X display location was not specified in the configuration dialog or a saved session, and the location inferred from the environment was of the form :0.0 (i.e., no hostname or transport type specified before the colon), or if no local display is specified anywhere (in which case a hard-coded default of :0 will be used).

This is more likely to affect users of the Unix version running PuTTY on their local machines, who will expect the display location to be taken from the environment; under Windows, users are more likely to specify the X display location explicitly, and also old versions of PuTTY defaulted to localhost:0, which could persist in saved sessions / Default Settings. Windows users could however be affected if they leave the display location blank in the configuration and rely on PuTTY's default of localhost:0.

This is fixed as of 2004-11-19. Workarounds for 0.56 include:

Specify an argument like --display unix:0 (Unix PuTTY only)
Change the environment variable DISPLAY in PuTTY/Plink's environment to the form unix:0 (or localhost:0 on Windows)
Specify the display location explicitly in PuTTY's configuration dialog

Audit trail for this bug.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2005-02-20 15:51:25 +0000)