(Another way to say that, I think, is tunneling X11 though SSH)
I don’t think many people know about this, but you can start GUI programs on Linux (or FreeBSD; anything running X11) and have the GUI display on your Mac over the network. One way to think of it is like a terminal services session, but only for one application.
It’s pretty handy if you forget how to do something in the shell, but remember how to do it via a GUI program – you can use this to start the GUI.
One catch is the remote box has to have X11 installed (and I think running) for this to work – and of course SSH.
Here is a movie of it in action:
You have to be using the AppleX11 shell, and the command to get X11 to tunnel though SSH is the following:
$ ssh -l [user name] -X -v [server]
(I hit post on this before youtube finished with the movie conversion so if you can’t see the movie you might want to check back later. My apologies)