Note: Support refers to the http://support.geosc.uh.edu website.

Alternative to Thinanywhere – PC X server

If you are running out of Thinanywhere licenses or have other issues, just don’t want to use it, there is an (actually several) alternative.

You can use a PC-X sever – what is it? Well it runs a UNIX X server on your windows/MAC system so that you can display graphics (windows etc) on your PC/MAC desktop from a UNIX system. MAC OS X comes bundled with a X server, contact me to get support on how to set it up but for PCs, you can either purchase a X server like Hummingbird’s Exceed (http://www.hummingbird.com) or use the PC-X server Xming which is free. You can download and install the software either directly from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming or locally from http://support.geosc.uh.edu/software . Once you have installed the software, start it up. NOW if you are running Windows XP and have installed the service pack 2, you need to give firewall access to X-Win 32 software, go to control panel and double click on “windows firewall”, click exceptions and give the Xming software access (this usually happens the first time you start the software, Windows firewall asks if you want to unblock Xming, to which answer yes).

After that just start up the secure shell software to connect to your favorite server, but don’t connect yet, you need to do a few more steps first. (Details about secure shell can be found on the documentation section on http://support.geosc.uh.edu).

In order to send the DISPLAY back to your PC, you need to perform the following steps before you connect to your server.

Once you have given the permission to tunnel the X11 connections across, connect to your favorite UNIX server and start up the X-windows application. You will get a DISPLAY back on your PC terminal. Make sure the Xming X-Server is running on your PC by checking the status bar.

Here is an example with the Melts program displayed back on my PC terminal.