Xming Locks!

Short Story

Starting up the gnome session manager from within a gnome-terminal avoids the annoying "Not Responding" problem that I get when going from Vista to Linux via XMing.

Long Story

Briefly, here is what I did to get it to work:

• Start Xming without access control
• SSH to the Linux system and set DISPLAY
• Start a gnome-terminal
• From within the gnome-terminal, start a gnome-session

Background

This is using XMing 6.9.0.31 to display something from Fedora Core 10 (2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686) on Vista Home Permium.

For reasons unknown (anyone here with info, please comment), XMing seems to lock up on Vista frequently. After as little as 10 seconds, the main window stops responding to requests.

I would set up XMing using the configuration that I outlined in a previous post.

Xming after a few seconds

Start Xming without access control

I'm not exactly fond of this, but unfortunately I did not find a way around this. If I do, I will post this info in a followup.

XLaunch dialog

This results in the rather...blank Xming display:

Blank and not very useful

SSH to the Linux system and set DISPLAY

Using putty or whatever, log onto the Linux system. Note that this is using SSH, telnet, but not with something graphical like an xterm.

Next set the X-Windows environment variable, DISPLAY, to point back to the Vista system. I'm sure there's some way of doing this with a script, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.

Setup the DISPLAY variable

Start a gnome-terminal

I expect that xterm or kdeterm or others would do just as well, but my system only seems to have "gnome-terminal." This should result in an unadorned, ugly, terminal appearing on the Vista system:

Note the lack of border and resize.

From within the gnome-terminal, start a gnome-session

Emphasis on from within the gnome-terminal! I've tried doing this from the SSH session and it does not seem to work. Don't ask me why... it's just Linux!

Once again, perhaps this may work using the KDE equivalent, but this is what I use.

After starting up a session, the Xming display changes from the ugly default to something better looking:

Note the window now has a window bar, border and the background has changed.

gnome-session also spouts about a page and a half of scary-looking gibberish. The thing seems to work despite all this.

Conclusion

Using this approach, Xming is much more responsive than with the other approaches I've tried. It is somewhat cryptic, and various steps may not even be necessary. If you find other approaches that work, please post them.

XMing Rocks (yes, it does)!

The gnome windows manager desktop on Fedora 10

Short Story

If you need to develop on Windows and Linux, XMing will allow you to run programs on a Linux box and display them on a Windows machine.

Long Story

As the chief architect, engineer, and only developer on the CLIPC project, I need to be able to develop on Linux and Windows. Developing on Linux has been something of a chore up until now, because I had to either "rlogin" onto the machine, and give up any GUI capabilities, or physically sit in front of the system.

Cygwin-X

I've been trying to get a better setup for a couple of days and then I hit on the idea of using the ability of X-Windows to forward a display to another machine. One of the (many) problems that I encountered was getting an X-Windows server to actually run on Windows.

At first I tried to use Cygwin-X, the x-windows that comes with Cygwin, but I found it difficult to use. Any time I run a program and it seems to do nothing, I start getting testy. Specifically, I selected

 Start>Cyginw-X>Start XWin Server

After a bit of puttering about, I recalled running "startx" from the keyboard. I tried that from a Cygwin session and was "rewarded" with this:

Ugh...this actually makes Windows look good!

At this, I felt like I had been thrown into a time warp back to the 90's when you could peg the CPU of a machine running X by just bringing up a menu.

Mind you, I have tremendous respect and gratitude towards the folks who maintain cygwin. But there are limits.

Enter XMing

After glaring at Cygwin-X for a bit, I tried looking for something else. Google, after much prodding and use of something-or-other: directives turned up XMing.

I've been using MinGW for quite a while in general, and for the Windows portion of CLIPC in particular, so I am reasonably comfortable with things MING. I downloaded it and installed it in under 10min. Perhaps under 5min.

With most things Linux-like I expect stuff to take at least a weekend, so this was a very nice surprise.

At first I got the same, ugly X-Windows starting stuff, but with a little bit of reading, I determined how to fire up the gnome window manager. The way to do this is to specify "gnome-terminal" as the "start program" that you get from running XLaunch.

In the interest of being more helpful, here is what I used for the values in the XLaunch config screens:

For me the most important aspect is that it can run Eclipse. I want to have some vague confidence that my stuff will compile and run on the Linux version.

Eclipse running on Linux and forwarded to Windows

Conclusion

MingX is a user-friendly solution for those who want to forward X-Windows from a Linux box to a Windows box.