hello all,

i used putty for connecting to my debian rig.
but i want to connect to the rig and start kde...

how can this be done?

Unless you have cygwin on your windows computer then you won't be able to see KDE anyway.
You can run it on the linux machine just by sshing in and running startx (or whatever it is you do to start kde) but like I said, it won't be displayed remotely, Windows can't handle that sort of thing on its own, it doesn't have a client-server architecture like X does.

First of all, you can't run KDE over puTTY, because that's a terminal client. What you want to do is to set up a remote X-windows session.

X windows is the basic, low-level system used for drawing lines, boxes, bitmaps and so on on your screen, and handling keyboard and mouse events. KDE is a desktop environment and window manager; it runs on top of X (i.e. it uses X to display its lines, boxes and bitmaps).

What you are wanting to do is to start a X *server* on the client machine (the one you're running puTTY on at the moment), and have the server machine (the one running KDE at the moment; the X *client*) open a login session on that X server.

Instructions for the server-side are here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/text/Remote-X-Apps
The fact that you're using puTTY suggests to me that you may be using Windows/MacOS/Risc OS or some other system, so you'll also want information on non-Linux X servers. You can get that from http://www.xfree86.org/

Once set up, starting a remote KDE session is easy. Start the X server, login with puTTY, and type:
where:

• host is the IP address of the computer running the X server
• A is the number of the terminal on that computer (this is normally 0)
• B is the number of the X server on that terminal (usually 0)
• /opt/kde3/bin/ is the path where KDE is installed

Hope that helps,

— Robert Lee.