Most terminals can be launched using the geometry switch allowing you to specify terminal's size and position (COLUMNSxROWS+X+Y) e.g.: gnome-terminal -geometry 73x31+100+300. Xterm -geometry 93x31+100+350. If you only use Cygwin for your Windows shell, then Mintty is an excellent console emulator. In fact, Mintty is installed as the default terminal emulator. Like the other options on this list, Mintty provides a collection of additional features like drag-and-drop, full screen, copy and paste and theme support. The xterm program is a terminal emulator for the X Window System. It provides DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 compatible terminals for programs that can't use the window system directly. It provides DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 compatible terminals for programs that can't use the window system directly.

I need to get remote X11 terminal access from Windows machines into my Ubuntu 16.04 system. I am choosing not to use RDP for this since this only affects the two Windows clients.

From the other Linux boxes it is simple, especially since they use RSA authentication:

and wham, bam, I just get the prompt

But from Windows I use PuTTY which gives a great CLI connection. Quick and easy, and it saves creds so the connections are made very quickly.

When I type this on the Ubuntu command line

Which means that GUI applications will not run.

I see PuTTY has the X11 option.

But it throws an error instead of working.It needs an X server on the client side to work with Putty.

Mobatek Mobaxterm Personal Edition

Question is in the title: How to use PuTTY to get X11 connections over ssh from Windows to Ubuntu?

1 Answer

Michigan Tech has a very succinct explanation of how to use Xming here:

Excerpt:

The PC interacts with the server through the X-windows system, forwarding the display from the server to the PC. Software must be installed on the PC to make this link work and the best software (so far) for this task is the PuTTy terminal emulator and the Xming X-window client.

PuTTy can be downloaded from https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Xming can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=156984&filename=Xming-6-9-0-31-setup.exe

Once Xming is installed, run the application called 'XLaunch' and verify that the settings are:

Then in your PuTTY session you can turn on the X11: Enable X11 Forwarding

So then save that, and every time that session is invoked you will get a GUI connection to Ubuntu, as long as Xming is running.

Xming is verified by the visible icon in the lower right of the screen like so:

In the Xlaunch settings it is selected to not run on startup, so when you don't see that icon then click on Start, type xming and press enter and it will start the x-server and show the icon.

Now, when you make the connection, then you can see

The leafpad editor, gnome-system-monitor, etc., work over the link via the Xming server on Windows.

It is easy to pull up nautilus and browse to

to get any of the installed system commands, as shown here:

Voila, X11 via SSH from Windows to Ubuntu.

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X Client Windows

I need to connect to a headless X Windows server (running on Ubuntu) from my MS Windows 7 computer over a 100 Mbit network. I could use VNC (or any other remote viewer) but the 3D graphics performance would be lousy I imagine. I used to have it hooked up to a monitor, but that's broken now and I can't afford a new one. A friend advised that I could try and use an X client, and that the 3D graphics wont suffer too much over 100 Mbit. Cygwin seems to be an option, but I was wondering if there were any more lightweight options.

X11 Terminal Windows 10

closed as off-topic by a CVn, DavidPostill♦, fixer1234, Kevin Panko, NifleMay 26 '15 at 11:51

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

• 'Questions seeking product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they become outdated quickly and attract opinion-based answers. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve. Share your research. Here are a few suggestions on how to properly ask this type of question.' – a CVn, DavidPostill, fixer1234, Kevin Panko, Nifle

5 Answers

Xming is popular and free, although since I use the rest of Cygwin anyway, I tend to use Cygwin's X server.

Oh and by the way, the client/server terminology in X seems backwards until you think about it the right way: servers are the things that provide a display service; they display the graphics and take mouse/keyboard input (like your Windows box); clients are the programs (running on Ubuntu in your case) that need the display service.

As of 2015, I'd favor VcXsrv Windows X Server after using Xming for years.

It's free, it's open-source, and 64-bit versions are offered.

I tried transmitting 3D graphics over the network one time and figured out one thing: performance is bad. This happens because all accelerated graphics drivers do not really transmit any 3D data through the network (even if this is loopback or even UNIX abstract socket) but do some direct rendering.

The configurations I tested included both Xming (Xming is really ported Xorg) on Windows + X clients on Linux and both Xorg and clients on Linux. Network was 100Mbit, graphics card was NVidia GeForce FX 5200 (that's not a very recent card, but it definitely can handle glxgears), and both computers have PIV class processors and around 1Gb of RAM through for these two limits were not reached.

I started glxgears as a client. In both cases it displayed very chopped animation and FPS values around 30 or 50. To compare, I also run glxgears native and it showed around 8000 on Linux host and IIRC 500 on Xming with ported glxgears (that was about a year ago and Xming performance may be better now). So network performance is definitely the bottleneck for 3D graphics.

Also I must note that VNC operates only with 2D graphics: it has a very simple protocol that consists mostly of commands like 'show this rectangular image on that coordinates', so it definitely won't show any 3D performance.

It sounds like VirtualGL is the kind of thing you're looking for, though I know even less about it than the Wikipedia article. Good luck!

You might want to try Xming. Also, check out this LinuxJournal article, which gives a lot of info on the subject.

Note that on Linux, for security reasons, xdmcp is not enabled by default.For added security, I recommend you encrypt your connection using SSH. See this section from TLDP for more information about how to set everything up.

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