[OmniOS-discuss] Possible to run desktop applications via ssh -X or similar?

[Valrhona]

Thanks to all the hard work put in to getting the pkgsrc programs
running. I followed Jonathan Perkin's instructions, and got gnome
running on bloody:

http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/whats-new-in-pkgsrc-2013Q2.html

I couldn't get any desktop to start running X on the stable version
(151006); is this expected? That is, do we need bloody to get any X
Windows system going?

I also got xfce started, but could not get Thunar to run (just said it
core-dumped). Seems like this is a very promising start, but it will
be a while before a full-fledged desktop runs on top of OmniOS, though
I certainly would be delighted if this could be done: all I need to
nautilus, browser, maybe openoffice, and, crucially, virtualbox, maybe
VLC or a media player, PDF viewer and some small utilities, and would
be very, very happy (I know there are other desktop distributions, but
none of them seem to be nearly as reliable as OmniOS, in terms of
updates).

But shy of that, it would also be extremely useful to me to be able to
run a file manager like Nautilus from a remote desktop. The data on
the file server is shared over NFS, but moving huge numbers of files
over this NFS mapping can be pretty slow. I would like to be able to
ssh -X into the server, and then run nautilus to move large quantities
of files around more quickly.

I tried this, by installing nautilus from pkgsrc, 'pkgin in nautilus'.

Then I log in via ssh -X, and at the command prompt just type
'nautilus'. I get the following error:

Could not parse arguments: Cannot open display:

I always get this error, no matter what nautilus options I run from
the command line. Am I doing something stupid, if I just want nautilus
to run on my local desktop, while moving files around directly on the
server? Or is there another way to accomplish the same end goal?
Thanks!

Peter