Remote X-Windows on Winbloze box?
 

Hey guys,

I did a bit of checking here and I don't see any clear answers, only much debate and pointers to links which others declared not helpful.

I would like to be able to let someone using Winbloze to connect to my machine (securely!) and have everything be as if he were directly connected. It should be just like it is for me- I log in to a console shell, and then I can start my X-Windows session and do whatever I want. He should feel as if he were sitting directly in front of a finely-tuned Slackware powerhouse himself.

Is there a simple solution for this? Please, only respond if you've personally set something like this up and used it. I can't afford to go on another wild goose chase at the moment as I have too many other wild goose chases rolling along already :p

Thanks,
Randall

The solution is very simple. It's called cygwin. I use it everyday both at work and at home.

http://www.cygwin.com/

I've done this using the secure shell client for windows (I'm sure it's possible with putty too) and Hummingbird Exceed, which is an X server for windows. The secure shell provides you with the CLI, and exceed does the X11 display bit. So for example, if you type konqueror into the secure shell CLI, then it'll open up a konqueror window on the machine at which your friend is sitting. You'll need to set up your friend as a new user (unless you want him to run as you?...), but other than that, it's fairly simple to use.

Hummingbird Exceed is not freely available (you have to buy it), but it does work well. I'm sure there's a free equivalent, but I don't know what that is.

EDIT: I did a quick google, and it seems cygwin may be able to provide you with X11 tunneling for free, although I've never used it.

EDIT 2: Beaten to it!

Hope this helps.

Thank you. I didn't realize that one product was enough to provide an end-to-end solution. Now, what's involved in getting it setup?

Thanks, I'm looking for a free (preferably open source) solution as I need to make it easy for the other fellow or he'll stay on Windows. And along with that, I'm hoping someone can provide simple list of instructions to get things working.

Cheers,
Rand

There are instructions on the website for Cygwin/X here. They are pretty much a step by step guide, IIRC, so you shouldn't have many problems.

It is simpler than cooking an egg.
just download the installer, run it and check the boxes of what you want to be installed, check the XFree box, and openssh if you want to do that securely.
After that, you click on the icon on the desktop and a terminal appears, then you ssh -X yourbox.
You can run the installer again later in order to install additional packages (xfce, gnome and stuff).

There's also a list of packages that are required (and ones that are optional) for Cygwin/X in the docs, at least there was when I installed it.

Brilliant! Thanks for the info. It's like one-stop X-Window shopping :p

Thanks for the link Nylex.

If you don't need the whole Cygwin environment, you should use Xming, which is the same X server without Cygwin.

Thanks for the link. I think the guy is already running Cygwin so it's probably the best choice. And he needs more than X, he has to run openssh or some secure tunnel too.

There are many other good SSH implementations on Windows; for example, PuTTY. To enable X forwarding in Putty, go to Connection -> SSH -> X11 and check "Enable X11 forwarding".