GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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X DISPLAY

It seems that the DISPLAY environment variable might need to be set, as in:

  export DISPLAY=":0.0"

The symptom is that the installer will complain about not being able to determine if the monitor is able to display colors.

Jarda Benkovsky reported (29 May 2006) a problem when running the installation from a remote FreeBSD machine by loogging in with ssh -X (to enable X11 forwarding). When running runInstaller the splash screen appeared okay but only empty windows opened after this. The solution is that you need to connect with ssh -Y (to enable trusted X11 forwarding).