X11 on Windows

One of the nice things about having a Mac is that you get a real shell with full UNIX support underneath. I know most of you do not connect to X sessions on a regular basis, but if you are doing any type of linux/unix administration, having a working X11 installation can be a life saver.

In the old days, I used to use Exceed for X sessions and then I migrated to cygwin. However, both of these solutions are somewhat clunky and don't provide the ease of use as my new favorite: Putty and XMing.

When you download XMing, make sure you also grab the fonts installer which is quite a bit larger (around 22 meg) than the regular XMing package. The fonts will allow you to run more X11 apps than the standard package (such as IBM TXSeries installer). Download and run the XMing app first, then the fonts - take all of the defaults. Make sure you start XMing every time you boot up your machine if you want this to work seamlessly.

The next thing to do is to download Putty and then go into the configuration for the default session. Under connection->ssh->x11 - enable x11 forwarding at localhost:0. This will forward your ssh connections to use the X server on your local machine. Now, connect to your unix/linux server via SSH. Once you are logged in, try to run "xclock" or something similar to test your installation. At this point, you should now see xclock fire up on your screen in all of its 8-bit glory.