ForwardX11

Tunneling of remote X11 output to a local machine behind a firewall (ssh, X11, ForwardX11)

If X11 forwarding is globally disallowed in your local machine, you need to override this by editing ~/.ssh/config: Host hostname.domain.org ForwardX11 yes Then you just ssh into the remote machine hostname.domain.org: ssh -X username@hostname.domain.org And execute some program that outputs to X11, e.g.: xclock &