I've seen this: your sitting at a PC and have an Exceed terminal or maybe PuTTY connected to a Linux system. You type a command in the terminal session, I think maybe a Tk script, and a GUI pops up on the Windows system (accessing a Linux database, but that part is unimportant).

How is this done? Using X? Some feature within Tk? Something to do with the terminal software?

Thanks,

pas

could be many many things. maybe X on Cygwin or Xwin32

I downloaded "rdesktop" (you can pick it from several sites) and it does exactly what one expects: a clean windows desktop.

Use something like this as the command string when generating a desktop launcher: rdesktop -g 1024x780 -u "username" -T "Title of window" servername.domain

Hope this helps.

well no, that doesn't appear to relate at all to what he's asking. rdesktop is merely a linux client for a windows terminal / remote desktop. he's aksing about accessing linux from windows, not windows from linux.

No, sorry... maybe it is that way round, my probable bad. Still think he's after more than a desktop viewer.

Could be colinux too.

I use PuTTY on my Windows machines regularly. I'm able to connect to Linux machines, with X11 forwarding enabled, and open GUI's from the Linux machine. To do this, you'll need PuTTY or something similar, along with an X server for windows(there are several). I've been using Xming(X server for windows) along with PuTTY for quite a while now and it seems to work pretty well. In fact, with this combo you can connect to a Linux machine and open a session with KDE or Gnome, although it will run kinda slow. However, I generally just open a terminal through PuTTY, then open whatever GUI I need from command line.

I want to thank all responders and especially Chromezero. Everyone else, probably my fault for not being clearer -- it is a Windows machine you are sitting in front of, and running a terminal program such as PuTTY to access Linux. (Most corporate environments seem to have this setup.)

The neat part was typing a command in that terminal and having a GUI pop open on the Windows desktop. I believe it could be "X11 forwarding enabled" as ChromeZero says, but I was hoping for more detail? I know I can say

DISPLAY=hostname:n.m

to set the place to send the GUI. And I think the "X server for windows" part might be provided by Exceed (Hummingbird). So that seems correct. I'm trying to reproduce that environment on another set of systems.

Thanks again.

cygwing/x will cover this for you. you don't need a full exceed instance.

The crucial ingredient is the Windows-hosted X server. There are a few of these, and some have already been mentioned in this thread: Exceed, and XMing. There are others, and a decent list can be found at http://www.rahul.net/kenton/xsites.html#XMicrosoft. Some are commercial. like Exceed, which is a good product.
These X servers serve the same purpose as the usual Xorg/XFree86 X servers normally used in Linux. Using Putty or other SSH client to provide a secure SSH tunnel for the X traffic is a common way of making the connection between the Windows X server and the X client(s) running on the remote host(s).
--- rod.

Exactly, that's the part most people tend to overlook.

If you're using PuTTY, there's an option, SSH>X11>"Enable X11 Forwarding", that allows exactly that. It enables you to forward gui's from the Linux box to the Windows box. This is assuming you have an X server running on the Windows box, such as Xming or similar.

As I mentioned before, I use PuTTY with Xming. They do the job and they're free(as in beer) so I can't complain much.

Yes, I see the X11 forwarding now. On my PuTTY it is a checkbox under Connection>SSH>Tunnels.

I'm looking into the X-server-for-windows portion. Thanks for the links.

In the environment I came from, both the terminal and X server on Windows came from Hummingbird Exceed. It is a reliable product. I don't know how much it costs however.

I should have this working soon with all of these great tips!