Xming — Standalone Freeware Windows X Server
If you need to access a system running a version of unix from your windows system, you can take advantage of the client server design of the unix X-Windows server to have programs from the unix system display directly on your Windows machine’s monitor where you can use them just like you were sitting at the unix machine. The catch is that you have to have a Windows X-Server running on your Windows system. Commercial X-Server programs are expensive — sometimes very expensive. Cygwin has a free Windows X server, but you have to install a complete Cygwin environment to use it and it does not seem to be updated nearly as often as it should be. I’ve recently discovered a second freeware Windows X server, the Xming X Server for Windows. This is a standalone X Server that installs into a single directory. Xming is also updates regularly. It also seems a bit faster than the Cygwin X server on my machine.
If you need an X-server for a Windows box, try Xming first. It seems to work well, not waste system resources, and free beats the high cost of the commercial X servers — especially as they often don’t seem any faster or better than Xming. I have a VMWare virtual machine running a copy of Kubuntu on my system and use Xming to run software from that virtual machine directly on my Windows desktop. It looks like I am running Linux and Windows XP on one joint desktop — and that is exactly what I am doing. This gives me the best of both the Linux and the Windows worlds on one machine without having to reboot to switch between them or shift between separate desktops.
Rating: 4.5
Operating System: Windows XP, Windows 2003
License: Open Source (GNU License)
Price: Free
Version: 6.9.0.18
Web Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming
[tags]Windows XP, Windows X Server, unix, linux[/tags]
There is one feature that commercial software does have (and that I’d very much like to see in Xming). My Micro X-Win has what they call “advanced window caching” that greatly speeds up local windows written from a remote machine. Without this feature, the window must be re-written from the remote machine whenever it is covered and then uncovered, or when switching desktops in a multiple desktop configuration. With a DSL-type connection, this is VERY much slower than with a local cache. Any way we can get this feature added to Xming?