There are a few products out there for running X windows programs remotely on
Windows, but you might be surprised to hear that the best one also happens to be
free. I've used X-Win32
and Exceed
in the past, both of which cost money, and neither of those products have worked
as well for me as Cygwin.
Cygwin is actually a whole Linux-like environment that runs on Windows, but I
don't make use of anything except its X windows support. After all, why
use a fake Linux environment when you can run programs remotely on a
real Linux machine? The whole beauty of X windows is that programs run remotely
just about as well as they do locally.
Here's what you need to do to get Cygwin's X support working:
1. First of all, I'll assume you're using
Putty as your
SSH client. It's a good free one, but other SSH clients will work, too.
2. Run the Cygwin installer and
accept the defaults until you see the following screen:
3. Click the X11 line until it says 'Install' and then finish the installation.
4. Go to the newly created Cygwin start menu group and run Cygwin Bash Shell.
After the command prompt starts up, type 'exit' to close the window.
IMPORTANT: Even though you may never want to use Cygwin's Linux-like
environment, you MUST start it up at least once before trying to use X.
Skipping this step will leave Cygwin stuck in an unusable state - trust me.
5. Cygwin comes with a handy batch file called 'startxwin.bat' for starting the
X server. By default, it also opens a terminal window to the Cygwin environment.
Since you won't be using that terminal window, you can prevent it from opening
by adding REM before the following line near the bottom of startwin.bat
(located here on my system C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin):
%RUN% xterm -e /usr/bin/bash -l
6. Now make a shortcut to startwin.bat if you want and run it. You should
see an X in the system tray at this point.
7. The only thing left to do is enable X11 forwarding in Putty as show below.
Keep in mind that this is not a global setting, so you'll need to make this
change (and save it) for each saved session.
8. Now connect to your linux system and run 'xclock &' to see if
it works.
9. That's it!