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X Forwarding with Putty on Windows

Intro to X Forwarding

Unix machines have been able to run software on a remote machine and display the GUI locally for almost two decades. Linux and Mac OS X support X Forwarding with no extra software. Any terminal on Linux should do X Forwarding, Mac users need to run "Applications > Utilities > XTerm". In a command line terminal run "ssh -Y jdoe@compute.example.edu matlab" and you'll be running matlab on "compute.example.edu" but seeing it on your desktop.

Windows users need two pieces of software: an secure shell program (ssh) to establish the remote connection and an X Server to handle the local display.

Prerequisites

Putty for SSH
XWin32, or XMing with Portable PuTTY for the XServer

Configuring Putty

Add Unix hostname
Switch Protocol to SSH
Type name of session in saved sessions
Click 'Save'

Choose 'Tunnels' from 'Category' list
Check 'Enable X11 Forwarding'

Choose 'Session' from 'Category' list
Click 'Save'

Starting the X Server on Windows

Configuring XWin-32

Start XWin-32
Click 'Security' tab
Click 'Add...'
Enter 'localhost' without quotes and click 'OK'

Configuring Xming

Just run "All Programs > Xming Xming" and it should work if you've got PuTTY configured.

Connecting

Start XWin32
Start Putty
Double click on the saved session you want

Enter username and password as requested
You should now be able to run X applications from the host
on your local desktop

Fonts

Some older versions of XWin32 require fonts to be install to run certain programs, such as Mathematica

They can be found here.

William S. Bear
v1.1
Feb 27, 2006

www.math.umn.edu/systems_guide/putty_xwin32.html
Last Modified August 27, 2007
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