Can X Server be installed on Windows?

stickman · 01-05-2004, 09:48 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by coolamit78
My argument is that unless the original developers code an application to work on 2 different O/Ss.....we cant claim that application to be a cross-platform application....Basically, what I am trying to say is that if the X Consortium develops X11 for Windows, then we can say that X is platform independent....So Cygwin or any application developed by cygwin is not X....Its actually a 3rd party software....

But they have ported X to multiple platforms. It runs on Solaris, HPUX, Mac OSX, etc. Just because you can't find a readily available version for Windows that does not mean that it's not cross platform. The source code is available on the X website. If someone takes the time to port it to Windows (and one of the other commercial vendors may have already)... I guess you can figure out where I'm going with this...

yapp · 01-06-2004, 08:06 AM

To feel a little of the X taste on Windows for free, you sould try this: (X11 forwarding over ssh)

Download the weirdX applet from http://www.jcraft.com/weirdx/
Download PuTTY from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s.../download.html
Open WeirdX, perhaps you can double-click on it, or you need to run it with "javaw" from the MS-Dos prompt.
Open an SSH connection with PuTTY to your machine, and select the option X11 forwarding the configuration. You need to enter "localhost:2" in the host field, because weirdx is listening at port 6002.
then connect with putty.
run an X11 application in putty, something like xclock, xterm, xeyes, gedit, or mozilla
close the applications, and quit.

If you're on linux, all you have to do is "ssh -X user@hostname" to enable X11 forwarding. Only enable X11 forwarding if you really have to, because you allow the other host to interact with your local display!