From dek@brown.berkeley.edu Tue Jan 28 13:08:53 2003 Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc References: <3dd91402.12014786@news21.on.aibn.com> Message-ID: Organization: University of California, Berkeley Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 17:47:16 +0000 (UTC) From: David E. Konerding Subject: Re: Free X-terminal for windodws In article <3dd91402.12014786@news21.on.aibn.com>, Lew Pitcher wrote: > On Mon, 18 Nov 2002 16:05:12 GMT, in comp.unix.misc, Paul Pluzhnikov > wrote: > >>"Stefan Lindvall" writes: >> >>> Is there any good free X-terminal for windows? >> >>You probably want Xserver for Win32, not an X-terminal. >> >>Cygnus/XFree86 (http://www.cygwin.com/xfree) is quite good, >>but my current preferred solution is >>Vnc (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/). > > Which isn't an X server at all, and requires that the real X server be > modified to use it's local "VNC server" as a display device. So, a VNC > client on Win32 will need two installations: one on the Win32 platform, and > one on the Unix platform, and the Unix platform install will require a > custom (i.e. uses VNC as a display) X server on the Unix platform as well. The latter is just 'Xvnc' for which there are several ports (Linux, Solaris, etc). If you don't have a Unix host handy, it's easy to install VMware with a Linux instance on the win32 machhine. At that point, you almost don't need an X client on the win32 machine, because the X server in the Linux VMware instance will do the work for you. You will probably get better performance since the Linux instance can DMA the display to the win32 master, after you've installed VMware tools. My approach is: install Windows XP on the machine, then run a Linux VMware instance. This is because (IMHO) the Windows XP desktop is superior to the Linux desktop, and some of the programs that I run are Windows only and use the graphics hardware w/ OpenGL or DirectX. This is a 'best of both worlds' because you have a nice, stable Linux box in which you can get all your real work done, and a 'pretty face' Windows desktop. I've also done the opposite (Linux host w/ Windows VMware guest). I've used commercial (exceed) and free (cygwin) X servers for win32 and they get the job done. Dave