Oct 18, 2010

Getting X11 forwarding to work in Cygwin

Introduction

You have a remote machine that has an X11-based program that you want to open in Windows.

Execution

Follow these steps to get it to work:

# A bunch of status will print to stdout.
XWin -multiwindow &

# This is case sensitive.
export DISPLAY=:0.0

# You should see something like "debug1: Requesting X11 forwarding with authentication spoofing."
ssh -Yv myhost

Try a simple program to test it. I like to use xterm.