X-terminal (and other Unix access) on PC

New recipe

Now that Telnet access to lxplus is no longer allowed, my recipe is to first install PuTTY and Exceed. Then when you want to run X-Windows programs:

Start Exceed Server (the icon simply labelled "Exceed" in the Start Menu)
Start a session with PuTTY
Launch further X-Windows clients by typing commands like
xterm &
either in the PuTTY windows or a further xterm window.

These windows will be managed by Microsoft Windows and will behave like all the other windows on your screen (so you don't have to figure out which is the right way to resize this particular window ...). I prefer it to having the Exceed window the size of the screen running a different window manager inside it (what you get from the CERN Settings/Lxplus thing).

You need to enable SSH tunnelling in PuTTY. This seems to be the default, otherwise select Connection->SSH->Tunnels on startup of PUTTY and select Enable X11 forwarding like this:

To speed things up, it helps to set up a standard session in PuTTY:

and copy the Windows shortcut to PuTTY and modify it to load your favourite session directly:

The old recipe (when telnet access was allowed)

08-Feb-05 The following notes are no longer very relevant now that I can use Exceed V7.0 properly to effectively make Windows 2000 into the Unix/Linux window manager. Forget about FVWM2, Gnome, KDE and all the other clutter.

I long ago abandoned my physical X-terminal since I can get the full functionality and a lot more on my PC with its large screen using Exceed Version 6 (from the Nice Start Menu/More Applications).

Advantages I've noticed are:

Faster switching between X and windows.
The AFS client for Windows NT means you can operate on AFS files using Windows applications such as the Explorer, editors, Excel, etc.
Basic service applications that you need to run all the time (mail, Web browser, file management, Acrobat, Postscript viewers, ...) do not need to compete with other users for resources on the Unix servers. (E.g. Netscape's cache will be on your PC's hard disk so it will not eat up your AFS file allocation and it will not take any memory.)

much

Quicker and easier start up of X sessions on various Unix hosts.
More desk space, fewer heat sources in the office.
Absolutely identical screen displays to the X terminals (except that the Windows task bar still appears at the bottom if you want it to).
Easy cut and paste of text between Windows and X.
Easy to copy graphics made by an X-windows application into any Windows application.
X-windows response seems a bit faster.
Fingers need to know one keyboard and find one mouse.
A top-of-the-range PC with a good quality large screen costs less than an X-terminal.

Disadvantages I've noticed are:

Conflicts for certain key combinations, e.g Alt-F4 in an X-window offers to quit the X-session instead of just closing the window (in HP-Vue). But these seem really minor.

There are a few little things worth noting about the setup:

Defining connections

To create a connection for a non-default machine (like slap or hpslap03), create a plain text file (e.g. with Notepad) containing something like

[Xsession]
Desc=
Interval=2
Count=0
RunXServ=1

[Server]
Window=1
Startup=2
ReStart=1
Host=slap

and save it with the extension .ses (e.g. as slap.ses). Convenient locations are the Windows Desktop or somewhere in my personal Start Menu. This is just a copy of the default rsplus.ses with the name of the computer changed.
Then, if Exceed 6 has been installed for the user (e.g. by having been started once), all you have to do is Open or double-click on this file's icon to start an X-terminal session. This seems to be quicker than starting a real X-terminal.
You can define several X sessions this way. Here is a picture

of one of the folders in my Start Menu with three favourite X-terminal sessions. There are also a couple of Internet shortcuts (for Netscape) and a Windows shortcut to my AFS home directory.

Back to Windows

To get back to Windows from the full-screen X environment:

right-click the Exceed button on the Windows task-bar
choose Minimize.

You can also bring an individual Windows task in front of the X stuff by clicking its button on the task bar (or the other standard ways like Alt-Tab, etc.).

Clipboard for Text

You can copy back and forth between the Windows clipboard and the X-selection:

Right-click the Exceed button on the Windows task-bar
Choose Tools/Configuration ...
Double-click X-selection
My settings then look like this:

Then you can copy text from Windows applications to X-windows and vice versa.

Clipboard for Graphics

To copy a screen image from X to Windows,

Right-click the Exceed button on the Windows task-bar
Choose Edit
Choose Copy Rectangle (or Copy All)
Use the mouse to select a rectangle on the X terminal display
Paste into any Windows application that takes graphics

Of course, you can't go the other way.

Starting other X windows

Sometimes you want to launch other windows from an application on another Unix host than the one you logged into via Exceed. Access control has to be done in Exceed.

Make sure that the terminal window has the right value for DISPLAY (do SET DISPLAY xxxxxx:0 where this is your PC's screen name as used by Exceed).
Right-click the Exceed button on the Windows task-bar
Choose Tools/Configuration ...
Double-click Security to see something like
Click Edit to edit your xhost.txt file (or disable access control altogether by checking the third check item).

Mathematica Front End on Unix

At first I did not seem to have the proper fonts when I used the Mathematica Front End on Unix. The remedy is also simple and described in the documentation from IT.

3/5/2004This is something that seems to come back every time they upgrade Exceed. Here is my summary of how to fix the problem:

Start Exceed, open it's Configuration (sort of Control Panel for Exceed).
Go to Font Management
Select Edit button
You need to treat the first two entries, by changing the "7100" to "7111" . Select each in turn and click the "Change..." button
The result should be
Exceed should now work properly with the Mathematica Front End started on a Unix systen.

JMJ
Latest modification: Tuesday, 08 February, 2005 13:58:46