1 Introduction

This tutorial is for Professor Andrew Campbell’s CS23 class at CS@Dartmouth. It will walk you through how to set up PuTTY on a Windows machine for SSH with X forwarding, with which you will be able to remotely connect, from your Windows machine, to Unix machines and open applications with graphical user interfaces.

2 Prerequisites

You will need the following components for accomplishing this task:

• A Windows machine (otherwise you probably wouldn’t bother looking at this tutorial anyway...)
• PuTTY, which can be obtained from
  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
  PuTTY does not require installation. You can put it anywhere you like; For example your Windows desktop should work.
• XMing, which can be obtained from
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/
  XMing does require installation. Double click the installer EXE you downloaded and follow through the installation with all default settings.

3 Configurations

• Before trying to run PuTTY, make sure XMing is already running—a ‘x’ icon should be visible in your Windows system tray.
• Start PuTTY. You should see something like Figure 1.

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  Figure 1: PuTTY

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• In the left pane, the node “SSH” can be expanded by clicking on the ‘+’ sign next to it. Then click on the “X11” node. Make sure the “Enable X11 forwarding” checkbox is checked, as illustrated in Figure 2.

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  Figure 2: Enable X forwarding for PuTTY

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• In the left pane, scroll back to the top, and click on the “Session” node. Then in the right pane, fill in the necessary info for the connection, and click “Save”. As illustrated in Figure 3, a connected named “connect2tahoe” is created.

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  Figure 3: An example connection config for tahoe.cs.dartmouth.edu

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• Click on the “Open” button, and proceed as prompted. Once it’s connected, try starting firefox from your remote command line. You should see a firefox window opening up on your local Windows machine.