A /dev/null equivilent for DISPLAY when the display is just noise

Question

I\'m running a java app which creates a visual display of some of the things it is doing, while it is doing it. However, I\'m want to run this in a script that won\'t have a dis

Answer 1

You can use Xvfb, as noted above. That way, you will never see the output (you can use a tool to take screenshots, though).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvfb http://packages.debian.org/sid/xvfb

Or you could set up a VNC server. Under Linux, a VNC server is implemented as a special X server that can be accessed via VNC, insstead of displaying on a local monitor. That gives you a headless X server, with the added bonus that you can connect to it via VNC just in case you do need to see what's going on.

http://www.tightvnc.com/vncserver.1.html

vncserver is a nice wrapper script for (tight)VNC, which makes starting a VNC server a breeze. Most distros should install it by default.