Hi there, I have to VPN and then ssh from home to my work server and want to run a python script in the background, then log out of the ssh session. My script makes several histogram plots using matplotlib, and as long as I keep the connection open everything is fine, but if I log out I keep getting an error message in the log file I created for the script.

 File "/Home/eud/jmcohen/.local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 2058, in loglog
    ax = gca()
  File "/Home/eud/jmcohen/.local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 582, in gca
    ax =  gcf().gca(**kwargs)
  File "/Home/eud/jmcohen/.local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 276, in gcf
    return figure()
  File "/Home/eud/jmcohen/.local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 254, in figure
    **kwargs)
  File "/Home/eud/jmcohen/.local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/backends/backend_tkagg.py", line 90, in new_figure_manager
    window = Tk.Tk()
  File "/Home/eud/jmcohen/.local/lib/python2.5/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 1647, in __init__
    self.tk = _tkinter.create(screenName, baseName, className, interactive, wantobjects, useTk, sync, use)
_tkinter.TclError: couldn't connect to display "localhost:10.0"

I'm assuming that it doesn't know where to create the figures I want since I close my X11 ssh session. If I'm logged in while the script is running I don't see any figures popping up (although that's because I don't have the show() command in my script), and I thought that python uses tkinter to display figures. The way that I'm creating the figures is,

loglog()
hist(list,x)
ylabel('y')
xlabel('x')
savefig('%s_hist.ps' %source.name)
close()

The script requires some initial input, so the way I'm running it in the background is

python scriptToRun.py << start>& logfile.log&

Is there a way around this, or do I just have to stay ssh'd into my machine?

Thanks.