Hello.

Here is my problem and question.

I have an old machine at home running Slack 12.2. Recently the graphics card got partially zorched so that X will not start (computer freezes). I have set the run level to 3 and it is working fine in CLI mode. But, up to this point when I have wanted to log into that machine at home I have remoted in via XDCMP using cygwin on a windows box. Now that the Slack box is in CLI mode it, obviously, does not respond to XDCMP.

That brings me to my question. Is it possible to make the xdm (kdm) listen for remote connection requests when X is not actually trying to manage the local display?

I know the obvious solution is to replace the graphics card. Well, the computer is of a vintage that only has AGP graphics and I'm a little dubious about finding a compatible card these days.

I hope my question makes sense.

You could use ssh from within Cygwin on the Windows box to connect to the Slack 12.2 box. If you enable X11 forwarding over ssh on the Slackware 12.2 box, then you can start an application requiring X and have that run in a Cygwin GUI session.
As an example, here is a PC booted with Windows7 that is running Windowmaker within Cygwin. A ssh connection has been made to a PC running Slackware and a KDE session was started using 'startkde'. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5050179

To enable X11 forwarding, you need an addition to /etc/ssh/sshd_config

1 members found this post helpful.

allend has a much better answer than what I wrote below. I'm leaving the below for the record.

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man Xfvb

I think the man page tells you how to start it also. You'll probably find the performance to be painful.

On the other hand, you could ssh into that server via putty (which is a free Windows ssh client). I log into linux servers that way *all* the time at the Day Job.

Thanks, that's a good idea. I set the X11 forwarding already in my Slack box a long time ago.

One follow-up question. Would I need to have started the X server in cygwin before doing the startkde? I assume I would. I guess I would also need to run ssh with one of the X-forward options too.

Another way to do it would be to install TightVNC server and SSH in to the machine to start a vncserver session, which doesn't need X running.

Just issue the command vncserver to start the VNC session, and then use a VNC client on Windows, with the address dependent on the virtual terminal reported when you started the vncserver.

e.g., 192.168.1.100:5901 if it starts at :1, 192.168.1.100:5902 if it starts at :2, and so on.

Yes, X needs to available on the receiving box.
Yes, add the -Y option when using ssh

maybe look at x11vnc