I am writing an app using GTK. The app looks great running on a local Ubuntu host. However, the intention is to run this app via Xming from Windows workstations. And the appearance is very disappointing. Particularly:

• The font is pixelated
• The default font size is equivalent to 8pt

Other apps, including Firefox, have these same shortcomings.

From what little I know of XWindows, I assume that the appearance is defined by the client host, and not the Xming server.

Even trying to use Google to investigate is giving me fits, since the nomenclature is confusing. What is the appropriate term for the host of the XWindows client?

I'm completely in the weeds here. *Anything* that helps me get my bearings will be *greatly* appreciated. Thanks!

__UPDATE__

The font seems to be defined by the Windows/Xming server and rendered by the Linux/GTK+ client. Since I'm not using a font server, seems likely that the client is defaulting to an undesirable font.

Can anyone confirm this theory? Running XWindows on heterogenous systems seems to be the road less traveled.

Another discovery: In a Linux server/Linux client arrangement, GTK seems to use a 2D theme when the server is on a remote host, and a 3D theme with a shared host.

I'd assume xming doesn't have full support. I might be tempted to run mobaxterm or Exceed instead.

Could change colors and fonts for app too.

More or less figured this out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server

Per wikipedia, font rendering has recently moved from the server to the client. Unfortunately I started investigating old clients, xcalc, xterm, etc, and reached the wrong conclusion. In fact, GTK uses Pango to render fonts; everything is based on FreeDesktop.

First solution is XDMCP. Xming implements this as well as anything. Broken in Ubuntu 14.04. I was able to get this to work in 12.04. This link has more details:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...n/+bug/1251281

Second: For nearly identical results, I only needed to edit a file called .gtkrc-2.0 as explained in the following link:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B

Using strace, I discovered that the remote server uses a different theme Raleigh; the local server uses theme Ambiance. On the local server, the theme is probably inherited somehow from the Desktop Manager.

Added the following two lines to the .gtkrc-2.0 file and got nearly identical results:

gtk-theme-name="Ambiance"
gtk-font-name="Cantarell 14"

Appearances are still not quite identical. The local server is a little crisper in every respect, which I assume is the result of compression.