I have a few Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4 servers and I'd like to be able to see the GUI from a remote windows machine. Right now I use putty to get to the command prompt but I'd like to be able to see the graphical interface.

I heard that there's a way to set it up on the server and also in Putty there's X11 forwarding that needs to be enabled and then you can see the GUI in the Putty window.

I've done numerous google searches and found stuff about using Exceed and other software to do this. Please do not give me links to that.

This should be fairly simple, I have a friend who's done it before but he can't remember what he typed in at the server prompt to redirect the output to the windows machine.

It's not that easy. Windows does not include an X11 "support", so natively it cannot take the forwarded X11 stuff over SSH connection; it's simple to do, but only after you have installed some extra software (like the one you mentioned, for example, or one of the others) that makes Windows able to deal with the X11 information. Linux has natively support for X11 forwarding, because it uses X itself, so Linux-Linux works easily. Like I said, on Windows you need to have some extra software that makes it able to work with X11, and most of the software costs money.

EDIT: on the Linux server end one simply edits sshd's configuration file (usually /etc/ssh/sshd.conf or something alike) and sets X11 forwarding to true ("on" or "1" or whatever format the config file uses, instead of "false" or "off" or "0"). After that, if the client (like PuTTY) has X11 forwarding enabled and firewalls don't stop it, it works -- in case the client-end can deal with X11 stuff.

I've asked my friend if he did anything special and he said he didn't install anything else on the windows box, he just typed in a command on the server, then enabled X11 forwarding in Putty.

I understand what you're saying about Windows not being able to natively handle X11... but wouldn't the output be sent to Putty?

If he is running some application which uses X (which your friend must be, otherwise he wouldn't need X forwarding), then he must have installed X server on Windows.

There are many many choices for X server on Windows. Many are free too. I don't remember the name of one of these right now, which all the people in my university used to use. It was not open source but free of cost. Since I like open source softwares, I used another approach, and I will explain that to you.

Install cygwin. You don't need to install anything except "xterm" and "openssh". The dependencies will be pulled by itself. Then start cygwin, type xterm. It will start the X server by itself. Type "xhost +". Then ssh to whatever computer you want to connect to.

(Here I am assuming that you use putty for sshing to another computer, and so in my method, you don't need putty at all.)

1. Where do I download Cygwin? do you have a link for it?

2. Do I install it on the Linux Server or the Windows machine?

3. With your method, will I be able to remote the ":0" console??

4. Do you have a step by step instructions on how to do this?

I'd like to be able to see the "0:" console.

I've seen a couple of other methods to do this:

The first one is to use VNC. However the documentation is very weak...almost none. There's no step by step instruction on how to set it up on a Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4 64 bit.

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/006apr05/features/vnc/
http://www.realvnc.com/documentation.html

The second one is secure Xwindows with SSH. This one seems more complicated and it doesn't talk about if you can remote into the 0 console.

http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/newsle.../xwindows.html


I'm kind of new to Linux so please bare with me. I just don't understand why it has to be so complicated. On a windows box, it would've taken me only a few minutes to set this up.

If anybody else is reading this and has step by step instructions on how to set this up, please post. Thank you.