Mr N

Occasionally you find an application that can only run in an X windows environment, which is a problem if your computer has a Windows installation on it. The best X Server you can get is Hummingbird’s Exceed but it is a bit pricey. There is an open source alternative - Xming.

Unfortunately it is a little bit complicated to set up and the documentation is a bit thin.

1. From the Start Menu click Xming->XLaunch
2. Select Multiple Windows and set Display number to 0 then click Next
3. Select Start a program and click Next
4. Set Start program to xterm
5. In the Run Remote section select Using Putty (plink.exe), the computer connection settings will become enabled
6. Set Connect to computer to the host name of the computer you want to connect to.
7. Set Login as user to your user name
8. Set Password to your password
9. Click Next
10. Leave the Specify parameter setting page, and just click Next
11. Click Finish

The XLaunch icon will appear in the task tray.

There is a lot of network traffic associated with an X server which is been transported over an encrypted channel; this may make the xterm take longer to appear.

You can run your X application from this window because it is set up properly, so running another xterm from here will work without a problem. The problem comes when you login using putty, it won’t be set up in the same way.

To use putty you must set the DISPLAY. This environment variable is used by X applications to tell it which computer to display on and which screen on that computer to draw on to. In a X server environment a unix box may have several displays.

From the initial xterm find out what the DISPLAY environment variable is set to.

echo $DISPLAY

Login to the remote computer using putty in the normal way, and issue the command to set the display:

export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0

I’m not really sure why it’s on display 10 or how to change it! If you know please leave a comment.

The X server will keep its connection to your PC while the first xterm is active. Once you close this down the link will break and you will not be able to launch any more X applications. If anyone knows how to keep the link then please add a comment.