== Never kill the screen locker This is a grump. Dear X applications (or any application on any window system): you should never, ever kill or otherwise force-terminate the screen locker. In particular, you *cannot* assume that just because you have been run that the user is sitting there in front of the screen and wants it unlocked. There are any number of ways that you can start up when the user is not present, and unlocking the screen in this situation can easily make things go horribly wrong. For one example, perhaps some resource such as an NFS filesystem wasn't available and your program hung as it was starting, so the user gave up, locked their session, and walked away from the computer to do something productive. When the NFS server recovers, your NFS IO suddenly starts working, and you actually start up, the user is going to be very peeved to come back to their machine being unlocked. (I'm pretty sure that I've seen KDE applications do this. The situation that caused it aren't clear to me, since I wasn't in front of the machine at the time, but I believe that the application was either trying to show a splash screen or trying to show a 'I have run into some problem, do you want to send a bug report' note.) I'm sure it's tempting to decide that your program has something so important to communicate to the user that they need to see it *right now* and you need to make it visible. However, you're wrong; it can wait until we know that the user is present because they've just typed in their unlock password. (The sole exception to this is if the system itself is about to crash or reboot, and thus your message literally cannot wait because it's about to disappear in a short time no matter what. But you'd better be very sure that you're not about to leave the user's session unlocked for any more than a very short time.) === Sidebar: starting an X application remotely Suppose that you are ssh'd in to your workstation and you want to start an X application, displaying on your workstation's screen. The easy incantation to do this (in Bourne shell) is: > _DISPLAY=:0 x-program &_ You may need to do something to get the program to live happily in the background, and you may have to specify where to put the program's window (depending on your window manager and the state of your system at the time; many window managers now auto-place new windows without user intervention). (In theory many X programs accept a command line argument to specify the X display to talk to, but with so many toolkits and systems these days, who knows what command line argument any particular program accepts and what restrictions it has. Setting _$DISPLAY_ is much simpler and it works for everything.)