I have been inspired ever since reading the section about X11 forwarding in Putty’s help file.
Sending windows that are supposed to exist on your Linux server to your local Windows desktop? Awesome, but surely unpossible?
At least, it was at the start…
My first task was to get Cygwin/X working with a current Cygwin install on my XP machine. Presumably once I had mastered that, I could then pull it off remotely from my Debian server. Unfortunately, whenever I tried this before I constantly got bs errors back saying that Cygwin/X couldnt connect to the display – I remember this put me off when I first discovered X11 forwarding last year. Determined to make a difference this time, I played with an XP VM. I currently use Sunbelt Personal Firewall (SPFW), and from previous googling I suspected that it might be interfering with things.
After uninstalling it on the VM, low and behold, Cygwin/X managed to connect to the 127.0.0.1:0.0 display straight away, and I saw my first rootless X windows ever (I had already been able to render X windows in a virtual desktop window, for some reason). As much as I love SPFW, this is pretty poor. Obviously Cygwin/X was allowed full in/out access on Trusted Networks, which of course the localhost is. Still, its going to need a lot more than that for me to ban this FW, so I left the investigations here for Cygwin/X (if anyone has any ideas as to what to do here, I would much appreciate them! Perhaps there is an obscure setting somewhere that I’m not aware of).
Continuing with tests on my main machine, I next moved on to Xming, which is supposed to be a better implementation of X Windows for Windows. Sure enough, my first experiences with it resulted in GPFs. However, using the XLaunch helper app with Xming is more flexible than Cygwin/X. I set the display to 1 instead of 0, and along with setting up Putty to forward X11 stuff to ‘localhost:1′ (it seems the fact that SSHD defaults to ‘localhost:10.0′ does not affect this), and I finally got my windows coming through SSH (hello xeyes).
Playing around with stuff like gnome-system-monitor and a full desktop via gnome-session showed that this method was very slow and CPU intensive (Athlon XP 2.25GHz FTW), and therefore not really practical for constant use.
Still, it was a proof of concept and suggested that there were better things to come – more posts will follow.
