SSH is one powerful tool. You can do just about everything under the sun using an SSH login to a remote computer. SSH works very well in low-bandwidth situations like dialup, or satlinks.
But wakeup, we’re no longer in the 80s – people want GUIs, let’s give them fancy-pants graphics, bouncing cursors and silly linux wizards. Remotely.
Enter Xming, what I would name as top of my favorite applications. Xming is just like X over SSH, for dummies (or people who would rather spend more time working).
Xming allows you to connect to remote or local Linux workstations and servers and run full graphical applications on those remote machines on your local Windows computer.
Here’s how it works: all of the applications are run remotely, but when it comes to the graphics, the information that would invoke the graphics is sent to your local computer, not a bitmap or a sequence of bitmaps like VNC. Xming uses a local X server on your Windows computer in order to display your remote applications. This local X server is 2D accelerated, and it’s sometimes difficult to even notice that you are working remotely.
Since Xming can run in windowed or full-screen modes, you can establish thin client connections in this fashion, or you can publish applications Citrix-style.
Xming is completely free to install and setup. It is a great way to manage virtual machines, and in fact is often faster than Microsoft’s Virtual Server ActiveX control (surprised?), VMWare’s Virtual Machine view (even with VMWare tools!), and even Parallels speedy virtual machine view.
To set the whole thing up, you’ll need a computer running Microsoft Windows, one Linux box, a network connection between the two, but you won’t need much effort.
First install the Windows Xming server on your Windows computer. We’ll use Windows XP SP2 in this example, but it could easily be other varieties. Xming can be found on Sourceforge quite easily, download it, run the install (use defaults), and start XLauncher.
On the Linux computer this are slighlty more complicated, but not by much. For Gnome or KDE on Ubuntu Edgy, go to the System>Administration menu in your menu bar. In Administration, we’ll select login preferences as we’ll be setting up a new logon method (we’re using XDMCP). Select the Remote tab, and enable remote logon (same as local) to your Edgy Eft machine.
Now on your Windows machine, set up XLaunch to logon to your Linux machine using it’s IP address. Save the setting if you want, and connect. You will be presented with a logon screen to your Linux desktop!
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I’m not able to get XMDCP logins to work with Ubuntu 6.10 and Xming. After the login screen I just see a blank desktop with a cursor. Any chance you know the secret handshake for this?
Hi John,
It looks like you have your local X server running just fine, but are not attached to the Ubuntu X server. Try looking into whether or not you have the right IP address for the host, and also make sure remote login is enable on the remote host.
When I try connection using putty, I get a message saying connection refused
Do you need to have ssh server running on the ubuntu side ?
I discovered by accident that the problem was ESD. So if you go in the sound preferences and disable ESD, it may work again. I can’t be sure at 100%, as it seems there are several reasons for this problem.
But that was very clearly the reason for me, now I can login quickly no matter what.
Hope it helps.
I discovered your blog looking how to get sound with xming and looking on your other posts, i realise your blog is so great! a fav for admins’ hacks!
greetings from a gentoo user!
I agree that for remote login to Ubuntu from Windows XP this is by far the best solution. I also had some trouble getting my remote desktop to show up. That is, I was able to connect ( I wasn’t refused), I entered user name and password, but only the background color of the desk top would show. Eventually I tried de-selecting the the clipboard option and I was able to login successfully. I still haven’t sorted out how to enable this option and get a connection.
To Mooncaptains comment:
I have the same issue here with Ubuntu 8.04 and Gnome Desktop.
It just shows this brown-orange screen. (Windows Vista, Xming).
But, I got the KDE Desktop running with the very same settings in Xming – I just changed the session on the logon screen to KDE.
I’ll do some testing later with the clipboard option disabled as you mentioned.
Ubuntu 8.04 – maybe other versions and distributions too.
regarding the clipboard. I got this off the X-Ming site:
If you connect via XDMCP to a system that uses gdm, and have a problem with the clipboard, you should add (or modify) this section in the gdm.conf file (or /etc/gdm/custom.conf) <<>>
[daemon]
KillInitClients=false
and then restart gdm with gdm-restart. Also some X Display Managers do not work well anyway with the Xming clipboard. So just try using standard ‘xdm’ as an alternative.
Don’t forget the gdm-restart. If you can’t find it then reboot. This goes for the other changes mentioned above. Nothing works until the X manager is restarted.