Every time i ssh into my raspberry pi, i get message:
Cannot open display "default display"
I've tried going into raspi-config and installing all the locales. Doesn't change anything. I've then tried googling it and nothing seems to work.
What do I do to make it go away?
This is a very common sign that there is something in the remote user's .bashrc file that tries to start something that wants to use the X display. That is what the message usually means.
A lazy way around this is to edit the logged in user's .bashrc and make the last line to be the clear command.
Advantage: hides the problem.
Disadvantage: you'll never know what is causing it.
Best practice is to go through the .bashrc file and find if anything is being run that needs a running Xserver. Also maybe try looking in /var/log/syslog for clues.
in the bashrc file i was sourcing multiple other files. and it turned out to be an xkeymap call that caused the message. Turns out the x in xkeymap is for... -x
You can test whether a console login is via SSH or not like this
if [[ $(who -m) =~ \([-a-zA-Z0-9\.]+\)$ ]] ; then
echo "SSH session"
else
echo "not SSH session"
fi
who -m produces hostname and user associated with stdin, and in an SSH shell there is output, and none in a GUI terminal, which we can test for. who plus two dummy arguments will produce the same effect, e.g. who am i (very popular), who mom likes or who a b etc.
The top grab is my Rpi4 GUI, the bottom is an SSH login from my Windows PC using wsltty.
