# ssh -X from MAC OS to Ubuntu, error with RANDR



## josruirod5 (Nov 29, 2019)

HI there, and congrats for the forum
After being helped by the forum a lot, I have registered to ask a question regarding the following situation:
I'm doing ssh -X from a Macbook with Catalina OS to an Ubuntu 16.04. I installed XQuartz-2.7.11 in the macbook in order to be able to handle the X11 and everything seems to be working. However, there are some programs that are not working as expected. I open a program, it starts to load and opens, but it's not responsive. Menus cannot be cliked and you cannot interact with the program. Checking the log in the terminal, I think this is due to the error: "Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display localhost:10.0" 
In the same situation but doing ssh from another Ubuntu or from Windows + VcXsrv, the program is working perfectly, without the RANDR error. So I'm fairly certain this has to be with something on the macbook or XQuartz

Any idea on how to solve it?

Thanks for your time!


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## Aquinus (Nov 30, 2019)

josruirod5 said:


> think this is due to the error: "Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display localhost:10.0"


That's because libxrandr can't be found. This is probably because you're using X via xquartz and librandr just simply isn't available. I doubt that's causing your issue though. It sounds more like performance is bad which isn't entirely surprising. Instead of using

```
ssh -X ...
```
Try using this instead:

```
ssh -Y ...
```
That uses trusted X forwarding which bypasses several security extensions. That should help improve the experience. Mind you that X is not light on network resources, so if you're doing this over the internet, it's going to be slow regardless of what you're trying to do.


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