Continuing with my tradition of offensively over-descriptive titles... how?

This really is a total Newbie questions, and belongs nowhere else but here, but how is it done? I've heard it's possible, but I've not found any proper tutorials for it on the net. I really do need a fair bit of hand-holding on this one - from configuring the ssh daemon to actually work on my computer to installing X software on the client machine at the other end.

If anybody knows of any good, nothing-assumed howtos out there, or (even better) if anybody here is actually nice enough to talk me through how to do it, I'd be very thankful indeed...

Well, there's this:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-X-Apps.html

It describes how to run an X application on one computer and have it display on an X server on another one.

Taking your title literally, you want to run an X client on your Windows computer, i.e. to have an X application for Microsoft Windows displaying on a Linux computer. This can't be done as such, athough there are a couple of programs that will help you forward a Windows' desktop on your Linux computer.

If, on the other hand, you want to display an application on your Windows computer when it's running on Linux then you want to set up an X server on the Windows computer, and tell it to accept connections from your Linux computer. Then just run the program on Linux using the appropriate DISPLAY environment variable, as described in the HOWTO.

I don't know of any X-windows clients for Windows, but no doubt someone else will.

You could install X.org or XFree86 on your windows machine under Cygwin no worries. I've heard of people running Windows apps under WINE in X11 in Cygwin on Windows just to call themselves l33t Stupid but kinda nifty.

1. Install an X server on your local Windows machine. X/Cygwin is a free X server for windows.

2. Setup your SSH server on your Linux machine. Depending on which distro you're using this could be on by default, or easy to turn on.

3. Install a SSH client on your Windows machine. "Putty" is the most popular Windows SSH client.

4. From Windows, start your X-server.

5. From Windows, log into your Linux server using SSH, with X forwarding turned on.

6. In the SSH window you should be able to start X programs and display them on Windows. Try starting "xterm" and if all goes well, an xterm window should open on your local Windows machine.

LinuxDave

Thankyou all very much for such a great response - I look forward to persuading my friends over aMSN to install these things so that they can log into my PC and find out first hand just how wonderful Linux really is!

(also accessing it from college, but that's not as [interesting|challenging|time consuming])


If someone will just tell me how to make OpenSSH (I think that's what I downloaded) start and stay running on my machine, I promise not to use any more of your time.

On this thread.

If you have a fairly recent Linux distribution, OpenSSH should come with it, and there should be a tool/GUI frontend to turn on services or daemons.

Which distro are you using? For example, in RedHat/Fedora go to "System Settings/Server settings/Services" and find sshd in the list and turn it on. Most Linux Distros have a similar tool you can use to turn on ssh.

LinuxDave