I know how to set the DISPLAY variable. I know how to “export” the variable. And I did. Still when starting
runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs
the installer would barf on me with a:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
and a big Java stacktrace. Googling around didn’t solve much. I tried installing (and removing) several old X-libs, and checked several other things, but nothing worked. Finally I opened up the install-manual (eeks), and went straight to the section of actually running the installer. It tells you about the DISPLAY variable, and how to check whether it works as specified. So I also gave the command:
xclock &
To my surprise, it returned an error: can’t open display. WTF? I double checked my environment variable and noticed I forgot the colon. Silly me. But silly installer as well. Why not give a reasonable equivalent of “can’t open display”?