Getting X Windows on a Windows computer Almost all non-Windows computers use X-Windows for their graphics including Mac OS, Linux, Solaris and other types of Unix. To view telemetry and plots from NRL you will need X windows. For graphic displays a high speed internet connection is highly recommended.

1. There is a full featured Linux derived set of software that provides X Windows and Unix/Linux utilities such as ssh, rsync, cvs called Cygwin. It is free and easily downloaded but will take about 1 GB of disk space. Download and install it from http://www.cygwin.com

After doing the basic install of cygwin, install ssh by installing Open SSL and Open SSH with the Cygwin setup. Look in the Net section.

To use the cygwin X server, start cygwin, type 'startx'. Test the X server by typing 'xlogo'. You should see a window with an 'X' open.

Once the X server is verified as running, use ssh with the -Y switch to login onto a remote compute e.g ssh -Y yourname@your.remote.computer

2. There are other standalone programs that provide X windows on PC. These have the advantage of taking up less disk space than Cygwin. We use a various kinds here at NRL including Excursion and Web Term X. Web Term X is provided to NRL users via a site license. To actually make the connection to NRL, a terminal program named Putty provides SSH encryption. Putty is available to NRL users from Computational Support.