Helpdesk

Thanks to: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ug/setup-cygwin-x-installing.html (that URL includes a few pictures, in case something is unclear)

GOAL To setup cygwin on a Windows workstation so that you can forward X11 apps from a Unix workstation.

ALTERNATIVES There are no other free and opensource alternatives to cygwin for X11 forwarding to Windows workstations. You can use commercial products such as Hummingbird eXceed, X-Win, or NX.

INSTALL cygwin

• goto http://cygwin.com/
• click on Install or update now! and pick a place to download setup.exe
• after downloading, run setup.exe
• choose to Install from Internet
• all other defaults are fine
• when asked for mirror, you can choose any, but http://mirrors.kernel.org/ is a pretty fast one
• when asked for which packages, there are two required to make this work:

      Net > openssh (which auto-selects openssl)
      X11 > xorg-x11-base (which auto-selects other X11 packages)
  

  ... feel free to include anything else you want

Now you've finished downloading and installing cygwin.

USE cygwin

• double-click on cygwin icon (this opens up a terminal window, where you have a more Unix-like command-line environment within Windows)
• to do X11 forwarding, type startxwin.bat (this will open up another terminal window with all the X display information already configured by cygwin)
• in this new terminal window, type
• ssh -Y ip.address.of.unixserver
• login with your credentials
• now you can run any X program and they will be forwarded from the Unix workstation to your Windows workstation
• examples:

      gnome-session (for an entire desktop)
      thunderbird (a particular app)
  

• you can run the programs in the background, which gives you back control at the command-line, thus you can forward multiple X11 apps:

      thunderbird &
      gaim &
  

In subsequent sessions, you only need follow the steps under USE cygwin.