I am on a windows machine connected to a linux box through cygwin. i am using the mintty terminal. the linux box has terminator, but i can't open it on my windows machine through mintty - this is the error.

what is a x environment.

casper-compaq@compaq:~$ terminator
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py:57: GtkWarning: could not open display
warnings.warn(str(e), _gtk.Warning)
You need to run terminator in an X environment. Make sure $DISPLAY is properly set

X is short for X-windows the original Windowing (Graphical User Interface [GUI]) system similar to the GUI you have in MS-Windows but predating it.

tty = teletype = terminal - this is typically a Terminal User Interface (TUI) that uses command line (CLI) rather than graphics.

Applications like PuTTY and mintty are generally TUI terminal emulators. An application like Xterm is a GUI terminal emulator.

Although you can use TUIs to attach over the network from your MS-Windows system to your UNIX or Linux system this is NOT a GUI setup. You need to run something like Hummingbird Exceed (commercial software) or Cygwin's Xwin Server (FOSS) on your MS-Windows system for X windows to appear.

Check to see if you have /usr/X11R6/bin in your Cygwin setup. If not you can use the Setup.exe that came with Cygwin to install the "xinit" package (expand X11 in the list you see to find xinit).

Once you have that going you should setup an Xwin icon with properties in MS-Windows like:
C:\Cygwin\bin\run.exe -p /usr/X11R6/bin startxwin -display 127.0.0.1:0.0

When you open your ssh session to your Linux/UNIX host using mintty or putty you can tell it to do X tunnelling. This makes it use the ssh tunnel to do the X windows display back to your MS-Windows box. (Type "man ssh" and look at -X option for information about this.) This is better than using standard X-Windows as it is encrypted AND doesn't require you to open ports in the 6000 range.