Remote Terminal and graphical access from windows: PuTTY and Xming

Owned by Marc Miller
Last updated: May 30, 2018
1 min read

To clarify, the graphical access portion is referred more as X11 Forwarding.

This allows the linux computer to put the windows that would have been called up on the linux computer to a remote computer.

This does not display the linux desktop.  This only creates the windows of applications called up as if you were on the Linux computer.

Requirements

Download and Install PuTTY

You can get PuTTY at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

Download and Install Xming

You will need to get Xming installers at http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

You will want to download the following:

  • Xming-mesa
  • Xming-fonts

Install Xming in the following order

  1. Xming-mesa
  2. Xming-fonts

Note

Use the default settings

Xming-fonts will give a warning that the Folder Exists, go ahead and click Yes and continue on with the defaults.

Step-by-step guide

  1. Launch Xming from the Programs Menu
  2. Launch PuTTY
  3. In PuTTY, in the Category section of the PuTTY Configuration window, expand out Connection → SSH and then click on X11
  4. On the right side, you will want to check Enable X11 forwarding.
  5. Back in Category, scroll up to Session and put in the machine you wish to connect to as normal
    1. If you want to keep this setting for the machine, we recommend you Save the Session with a name set in the Saved Sessions area so you don't have to set this up again in the future.
  6. Click Open to connect to your session.
  7. Log in when prompted as normal (If there is aPuTTY Security Alert, click Yes)
  8. Type in the command you wish to call up in the command line (ie: idle3, firefox, matlab, etc...)