X11 Forwarding to your PC

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X forwarding allows a user to run UNIX and Linux graphical applications remotely. In order to do this you need a ssh client that supports X forwarding, such as Putty. Click here to learn more about SSH and Putty.

Putty Configuration

  1. Open putty, and for the host name type in scully.egr.msu.edu
    Screen image of PuTTY Configuration
  2. Choose Tunnels, which is located under Connection and then SSH on the left hand side. Then click the Enable X11 forwarding checkbox.
    Screen image of PuTTY Configuration and X11 forwarding box
  3. To save these settings, go back to the original screen by clicking on the Session item on the left. Under Saved Sessions type in a name and then click save. These settings are now saved, and can be reused next time you use Putty by choosing the name you saved it under and clicking Load after opening Putty.
    Screen image of PuTTY configuration with X11 forwarding
  4. When you are ready to connect, click on the Open button.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT run long jobs or cpu-heavy jobs on scully. If you have a long running or cpu-intensive job, do the following: after connecting to scully, ssh to a compute server and include the '-Y' option. The specific command to make X forwarding work would be:

ssh hostname -Y

Read more about DECS compute servers here.

How to Set Up the X server

  • Xming

  1. Start Xming by selecting Xming from the start menu.
    • Start > All Programs > Xming > Xming
  2. Start Putty and configure as shown above.

  • Installing Xming:

    Xming is installed on all of the PC Lab computers, but it can also be used from home.

  1. Download the Xming package and the Xming-fonts package from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming.
  2. Install Xming using the default settings.
  3. Install Xming-fonts using the default settings.