freebsdguy

Last night a friend (on right) of mine tipped me off about an excellent X server for Windows. I got fed up using the cygwin so decided to try it out. Xming is a cool name too!

Here is what you need to get:

• Root Access
• Xorg installed
• SSH Access to the FreeBSD machine from the Windows machine
• Putty on the Windows machine
• Download Xming to the Windows machine

Xming can be downloaded from the Xming project homepage at Sourceforge.
Execute this after download and do a full install. It’s very straightforward and will just leave you with a small icon in the Windows system tray:

On the FreeBSD machine, if you’ve not got Xorg installed, quickly do a
pkg_add -r xorg
and you’ll have it soon enough.

You will need to update the sshd configuration:
edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config
adding the line:
X11Forwarding yes
to the end and saving.
Follow this up with a restart of the sshd daemon:
kill -HUP `cat /var/run/sshd.pid`

Then, on the Windows machine, load up your putty and change the connection settings to they have the X11 forwarding enabled:

Fire up your putty connection now. Once connected, become root and add an X application from packages and then exit back to normal user level:
su root
and then type your password…
pkg_add -r thunderbird
exit
Now we start the application:
thunderbird
Notice that it starts up on your Windows desktop. Try this out with loads of other applications too, it’s a doddle. I currently use it for email, web and xfce4 as a launcher of my unix apps. I’m also thinking of having Eclipse IDE installed centrally on a server and then connecting remotely every time I want to do some development - this one is ultra handy since that’s where my Tomcat server is too