X/gnome through ssh, clashes with local gnome?

[Lowell Gilbert]

Why are you trying to start a window manager on the remote machine?  
You only need (or can have) one per session, and in this case (as in
most cases), I would expect it to be on the machine that is running
the X server (which seems to be your Ubuntu machine).  

Just log into the FreeBSD machine and run your applications; they
will be displayed on your existing X session.
-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/