Mr N

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Xming - X Server for Windows

Posted by on 14 Aug 2008 in Techie
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.

7 comments

Comment from: Greg [Visitor]

Greg

I’ve been using xming for several months now and its worked very well in all cases connecting to several different distros (red hat, suse, ubuntu) and solaris. I used hummingbird, startnet and a couple others. this is at least as good performance wise and doesn’t have the bloat of hummingbird.

as for the DISPLAY variable. thats the the display is going to be sent. default is usually :0 but it can be pretty much any reasonable integer. Many times I have 2 instances of xming running the the DISPLAY for one set to :2 and the other one set to :3. just pick a number and be consistent. there is more to it then what I’ve said and more info is widely available if you google X display variable

09/12/08 @ 21:34

Comment from: Matty [Visitor]

Matty

The 10 comes from this configuration setting in the OpenSSH daemon the UNIX server you’re using: X11DisplayOffset 10

This causes the OpenSSH server to number the local X display numbers it allocates beginning at 10 instead of the default 0.

The idea here is that you may one day want to have up to ten normal X sessions (not tunneled over SSH) running on your UNIX server.

Personally, I think it’s dumb. We’re never going to connect large numbers of screens, keyboards and mice physically to our UNIX server, nor will we ever let the lusers into the data centre.

So all X will be over the network, in which case we may as well always tunnel the sessions over SSH, in which case we have no need for these 10 reserved screen numbers.

I don’t understand why you’d want to have 10 sessions not via SSH, and then *also* further sessions tunneled via SSH.

Hope this helps! :-)

24/03/09 @ 07:24

Comment from: venkat [Visitor]

venkat

Hi

Recently i have started using Xming free software to connect to one Solaris machine. It works. But i have a question in my mind. Is it possible to install Xming on WTS and publish Xming on Citrix web page? So that multiple users can start using it from one single installation.

Appreciate if you can provide answer to my question ASAP.

Thank You

Regards, Venkat

01/07/09 @ 19:17

Comment from: [Member]

admin
I don’t know, why don’t you ask on the Xming mailing list - ASAP.
02/07/09 @ 11:54

Comment from: Tom Harkin [Visitor]

Tom Harkin

Thank you for the notes. Was a god sent.

Tried doing it myself and failed.

24/06/11 @ 22:02

Comment from: [Member]

admin
Maybe you could share where you had trouble and post any solutions you came up with.
25/06/11 @ 21:50

Comment from: Aditya Dutta [Visitor]

Aditya Dutta
Worked wonders for me…Thanks for the notes.
19/07/11 @ 07:49


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