I was playing around with linux today and thought about running an application in a linux box while displaying the window in WinXP. Yeah doing a ssh from WinXP will work for command line and non-Xwindows applications, but how about if its an Xwindows application? After a few minutes on the internet, I found a good solution. It’s called Cygwin.

Cygwin is a set of powerful tools to assist developers in migrating applications from UNIX®/Linux to the Microsoft® Windows®; platform. Cygwin/X is the port of X Window System to Cygwin.
I downloaded cygwinx and followed the cygwin/X installation guide . An important note to remember is this…

You may also want to ensure that the inetutils and openssh packages are selected if you wish to use telnet and ssh to connect to remote machines.

So after installation, I fired up cygwin and I was given a shell prompt. Here’s what I did next.

1. I started Xwindows (I used the command ‘startx‘), and another window opened up.

2. I typed ssh -Y -l user remote-ip to login as user in the remote machine where the Xwindows application resides

3. Once I was able to login, I just run the application in the linux shell. You can try running xterm, or xclock and the application will be shown on your Windows Box.

The nice thing about running an application in the linux box is that you don’t use your WinXP’s resources. Since the application is running in the linux box, it utilized the linux box’s resources (ie memory, diskspace).

It also allows you to have the freedom to use one machine and manage things remotely.