What is Reddit's opinion of Xming?

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> so I wouldn't pay $6 for it at this point. But maybe future development will allow it to surpass those products.

The big question is will the author be regularly maintaining that package. The Xming author is releasing update an update about once a month which includes updates builds of various tools, and fixes for various issues.

If this app is $6 and that will be actively supported it may be a good deal. But if it is $6, and it won't be maintained, IMO it isn't worth paying for. The Xming has a history of maintaining the package for 10+ years now.

> I think that Xming is abandoned, and XcXsrv still has support.

Xming isn't abandoned. Last release was May 27th, 2018. But the person that maintains it now releases as 'domationware'. IE you have to 'donate' to download. Think of it like a patreon style arrangement where the 'donors' are sponsoring this person to maintain the package.

• http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

They are currently asking for 10 GBP or about $14 USD for a years worth of downloads.

A long time ago I used to run an X server on Windows (Xming) in what they call multiwindow mode, where your VM windows act just like additional Windows windows. My knowledge is way out of date, but IIRC aside from a couple quirks with things like copying/pasting between Windows windows and Linux windows, it worked surprisingly well.

I think what you are trying to do is x11 forwarding. It sounds like you need to run an x-server on your windows PC for the pi to send the GUI to.

Take a look at XMING:

http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

You made me curious about it so I tried it and got it working.

1. Install and launch XMING (on your windows pc), you should see it running in your notification area (by the clock)

2. In putty, before connecting, navigate to "connection" -> "ssh" -> "x11". Check "Enable X11 forwarding" and enter "127.0.0.1:0.0" for the "x display location"

3. Now connect to your pi (go back to "session" and put in pi's ip).

4. Once logged in, type "/etc/X11/Xsession" in ssh, and you should have your desktop pop up a few seconds later (be patient).

You can right click XMING in the notification area and uncheck "hide root window" to bring it in front of your taskbar. You can also run xsession with & ("/etc/X11/Xsession &") so that you can keep entering commands in putty while you have a ssh window open, otherwise when you ctrl+c it will close.

I'm not familiar with putty's xrdp but maybe you have it installed and just need to launch it (and you can use that instead of XMING)?

It can be a bit rough to set up depending on hardware, but I just recently built a new machine and have it working fairly well. I had some difficulty configuring it on my first try but then I ended up using Unraid and that was actually quite easy. Just make sure you're using the newest beta version if you go that route - especially if you want nvme support. This is a good video that shows how to do essentially the same thing I did.

Other than that my other issue was that I don't have on-board video, so I needed to use an old graphics card to get it all running properly. If only my new card was hooked up it would get claimed during post and then not assign properly to a VM, so I stuck an old ATI card in there and used that to boot unraid and then assign my 1080 after.

If you are like me and want to keep Windows open but also want to be able to use your primary monitor for Linux stuff I'd recommend looking into Xming. There is a "free" version but it's buggy and kind of sucks - it's like 9 years out of date and he updates it constantly. 7.7 runs great for me and allows me to have a linux toolbar on my primary screen as well as use my IDE which is on Linux as well. The only thing it sucks for is HD video since there's no graphics acceleration.

One of my favorite parts of this setup is that I can keep some of my VMs on VPNs all the time without it ruining gaming on my Windows VM. I use synergy for mouse sharing, with the windows machine as the server to avoid any input lag in gaming and the others as clients. It all works really smooth once you get it set up properly.

Yes, it is a distribution of Unix utilities, including a shell and various other tools, that run on Windows, much like Cygwin.

The advantages of msys2 over Cygwin is that Cygwin does things via a POSIX compatibility layer that is fairly heavyweight, so some tools in Cygwin can be significantly slower than the one ones in msys2. msys2 is a fork of msys, which uses MinGW, the "minimalist GNU for Windows" project, that provides a much more minimalist approach to porting GNU tools to Windows, using native APIs when possible rather than emulating POSIX APIs. The other advantage that is unique to msys2 is that it uses Pacman as its package manager, rather than the graphical installer that Cygwin uses or the custom mingw-get used by msys.

msys2 is more minimalist than Cygwin however, so it doesn't include an X server. For that, you could grab xming.

Basically, Cygwin provides a wider variety of software (it has its own X11, it has editors like Emacs and vim) via a POSIX emulation API, but it can be somewhat slow sometimes and also sometimes interact a little bit oddly due to this emulation. msys2 is more minimalist, only provides a smaller number of command line packages, but is faster and (I hope, haven't used it enough to say) fewer compatibility headaches, and you can supplement that with other native ports of packages like xming.

I guess the first things to do would be to look at graphics memory and processor utilisation. If you're using a dedicated GPU it's unlikely, but using any onboard graphics it may be that the system simply can't handle it that well...

It sounds to me like workstation isn't quite what you want though. Have you considered using X-Server to do this sort of thing? Something like XMing might work well for you. I've used it previously with great success, although that was when I was new to Linux and I had a guru leading me through the setup. Haven't used it since as my main interaction is on my desktop at work and my servers at home. Desktop is Linux, and I RDP into Windows VMs when required (backwards from how most work, but it does the job), and at home I use terminal only Linux machines since I simply don't need the drag of having a desktop environment running. Probably worth a shot though. It's basically the Unity feature of VMWare, but free, external, and in my experience faster than VMWare. Although I've not used VMWare Unity feature, I can say that having used vSphere from VMWare, the interface is much friendlier in X-server systems.

Edit, of course VMWare is virtualisation technology, but if you're hosting on Windows you may even do better to use Hyper-V as your hypervisor, instead of VMWare, then use X-server to connect to them and handle all windows over SSH. As they are on the same machine latency should be quite low and it should be very useable.

on a *nix machine it's as easy as typing ssh -X to forward X over the network.

To get X to work on Windows, you'd need an X server like Xming http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

I've never used it myself, it was just something I found when I was googling for a solution for you, so I don't have any advice on how to set it up. I suggest you RTFM if you wish to use it.

Have you ever played with remote X servers like Xming? They let you run graphical programs on a remote Linux box and have the actual GUI part appear on your local Windows machine instead, all via SSH.

I used to use Xming-portablePuTTY to solve this exact problem. Making sure all our servers are in our DNS and using SSH keys has pretty much eliminated the need to save session information except for rare cases.

I must admit, Kitty's scp/winscp integration is a nice.

> you just need the theme installed on both boxes.

That's all very fine when you are in charge of both computers and you can do anything you want. Not so much when you're running Xming from a pendrive in a public computer.

Hummingbird Exceed, now OpenText Exceed, is a proprietary (for pay) X11 server for Windows targeted at enterprise. You probably don't need any extra functionality it is providing, I'd start by trying Xming. There's lots of information on getting it working here. Mostly what you need from there are the PuTTY settings, the server-side stuff should be set up already. You will have to find out the name of the executable you're trying to run, right-click on it's shortcut and hit properties, and then look at the command field (in Gnome... KDE will be something similar)

I thought VcXsrv was derived from Xming, so a lot of the documentation for Xming applies. See http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

That being said Xming documentation is also poor. I had to go through a bunch of different pages over a few day to figure out what flags did what and how to run it correctly. Then X410 went on sale in the Windows Store and I used that instead.

I don't think that MSYS2 has X server. But it has X capable graphical programs like xpdf. Through the years I've used several X servers for Windows like Xming http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/ , Exceed, and currently trying out X410.

WSL doesn't have an X windows server built in, so it cannot open xwindows applications by default. Emacs should be complaining that it cannot find "DISPLAY". You can download and run an Xwindows server separately. xming is what I use. After running the xwindows server, you need to tell emacs where to find it by setting the DISPLAY environmental variable. For example: export DISPLAY=localhost:0 or DISPLAY=localhost:0 emacs & .

Emacs in the WSL console is just like emacs on linux. Your lack of syntax highlighting probably has to do with your terminal or emacs configuration. Maybe try setting your TERM variable to xterm-color ?

I have been using Windows Subsystems for Linux as a daily driver at work for over a year. It is a big improvement over cygwin from my previous workflow. (Although I still use linux on machines where I don't need windows software)

I don't like the default terminal/console from WSL. I usually just use it to start my favorite xterm: xfce4-terminal.

Another workaround is to

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- install an X-server on Windows (eg. VcXsrv, MobaXterm, Xming etc.)

- set the DISPLAY environment variable in WSL so that the X-server can display the VSCode graphical display.

export DISPLAY=:0

You can add the line into your .bashrc so that it is automatically set when you open the terminal.

- install and run the Linux version of VSCode in WSL.

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This way, you will be developing with VSCode and Python entirely in the WSL environment.

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1. Install XMing (http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/) and PuTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html)
2. In PuTTY, SSH to login.encs.concordia.ca, but before connecting, go to Connection>SSH>X11 and check the Enable X11 forwarding and set the X display location to localhost 0.0 (you can save this configuration for future uses on the original screen)
3. Connect and login with ENCS username and password.
4. Type "matlab &" and press enter.

This has worked for me.

http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

Or if you already use cygwin

https://x.cygwin.com/

I don't do any sort of front-end work these days but the tools I need have the same issue where ideally I need to use windows with a splash of linux.

Let me know if you go down the Xming route, I'm curious to know what/if any differences there are to cygwin (my default choice)

Yes > Putty is all you need to go Windows to Linux

Also, if you want to do a remote connection to a server using XDMCP, you can use Xming

It also helps in making a GUI based connection to the remote machine!

I don't understand what you are trying to do. If you want to run a normal X server, you need a device to display to and Windows doesn't offer that to Linux apps. The best that may be possible within Ubuntu on Windows is to run Xnest, Xvnc or something like that, which connects to a native Windows app.

At http://www.straightrunning.com/xmingnotes/ it seems you either need to download an old version or "donate" to obtain a password to download a newer version. I guess VcXsrv is a better alternative.

So, install VcXsrv in plain Windows, and some X11 apps in Bash, like sudo apt install leafpad, installing dependencies also. Then run VcXsrv, tell Linux apps to use it via export DISPLAY=0: in Bash, and finally run the X11 app, eg. leafpad. It simply works.

Don't leave an X server with no authentication open to external incoming connections though. That's a gaping security hole. Block it at the Windows firewall at least.

With Xming you can start a X server on your Windows desktop and it's seamless. I truly wish this would work as they (Microsoft) said they are only concentrating on the console/text mode apps.

If you're just running Firefox and another open source application, then why not set up a BSD / GNU/Linux machine or VM? You could set up as many accounts as you like without any licensing issues, plus those account can be accessed with no changes from Windows (http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/), Mac OS X, or any other OS which has X11 (which is most of them).

Why pay Microsoft for the right to run free software on your own hardware?

Your system is a bit weak for running a full bore linux system in a VM. If you're determined to try, double your ram at least.

Your best bet is probably to run it headless, and then use something like xming to provide the X server and window manager.

Just an FYI, you can actually run X11 applications on this by running Xming or another Windows compatible X-server on your local machine, and then running X applications through flinux.

KDE and Gnome will eventually be supported by running them in a X-Client mode - ie, The entire desktop acts as another X-client and connects to the local X-server, so the entire desktop appears in Windows in it's own Window.

The Xwindow server is a client/server design. The server in this case is what manages your display, and clients are the applications that connect to the server to display their widows.

Xming and PuTTY are what you need for your Windows computer. Start up Xming, set it to accept X11 clients from your localhost/loopback. (Yes, really. It should accept connections from your Windows computer.)

Setup your connection to your Linux server in PuTTY, enable X11 forwarding in the GUI options. Then connect to the Linux server. In the PuTTY window, run xterm or your preferred GUI terminal emulator. An xterm should display on Xming.

Should be good to go from there.

I haven't tried it but it is not really difficult, look at the ArchWiki's entry on it for example: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Secure_Shell#X11_forwarding

It seems that it can go cross platform as well actually, I found something called Xming, basically an X Server for Windows.

I'm actually planning on creating a similar setup, but going an entirely different route. Windows 8 Pro and Enterprise supports client Hyper-V. (I know, I know: most IT folks hate Windows 8.)

Creating both a Ubuntu development environment and a Windows 7 development environment within Hyper-V. Using RDP from W8 to get into the W7 environment. Using SSH (and Xming for any necessary X sessions) for the Ubuntu environment.

With a beefy CPU, an SSD, and a ton of RAM, hopefully it'll work better than switching between host OS's. I've found Hyper-V 3.0 to perform amazingly well.

I guess it really depends on what you're trying to do. In my case, I need both bootable as web-dev environments and like the idea of separating day to day browsing and such from that. Plus, being able to snapshot the environment adds a bit of extra protection.

Yes it is - this is what the X Windows system does. You need to run an X server (confusingly not a client) on your local machine, and run the actual program on the remote machine. There are lots of free X servers around, like this one. Of course, the program needs to have been written to run on X, but most Linux programs (for example) will work happily this way.

Yup there sure is! The program you will be looking for is called xming, which is an X server implementation for windows. I use it all the time. This is a pretty good tutorial on how to set it up with putty.

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