| Are you a Windows user who frequently needs to work on Unix? Do you frequently restart
your PC in Windows and Unix? Did you know that you can access and run Unix apps directly
from your Windows desktop?
That’s right! You can work in a good old X Window terminal right alongside your
spreadsheet in Windows. If you have a Unix system on your network, you can make it
accessible to all your Windows users. No Unix installation hassles, no need to configure X
Window on individual machines.
You need a Unix machine running the X Window system on your network, and X Server
software for Windows. Several of these are available on the Net, free. We checked one of
them—MI/X (MicroImages X Server)—and have also put it on this month’s PCQ
CD in \cdrom\featured\mix. We used a Linux system for our experiment, though any Unix
system running X should do.
More about X
Before telling you how to install everything, let me step back a bit and explain the
working of the X Window system. Unlike the monolithic design of Windows, X is based on
client-server architecture. That is, X is split into X Client and X Server. These two
components are usually, but not always, on one
computer. Thus, the X Server can be on one computer and the X Client on another,
communicating with each other over a network.
In the conventional client/server architecture, each computer on the network is either
a client or a server. Servers are powerful computers that run services like file and
print, or other applications. Clients are the computers on the network that access the
services offered by the server. The architecture of X is different from this. In X,
clients are apps running on the Unix machine. The X Server, on the other hand, runs on a
computer on which you want the graphical output. These computers can be PCs, Macs, other
Unix machines and don’t require much in terms of computing power or resources.
X Servers are programs responsible for displaying the output of the X Clients,
which are nothing but various Unix-based X applications. X-Emacs, the powerful graphics
package GIMP, and Xterm are all examples of X Clients. These apps run on a Unix machine
and communicate with the concerned X Servers whenever they need to display their output.
That is, the clients don’t display their own output, instead they rely on X
Servers to do the job for them. The X Server could be running on your Windows machine and
displaying the output of various X Clients running on a Unix machine. However, don’t
forget that this server could also be running on the same system as the clients.
Imagine for a moment that you are playing Space Invaders in X. The game is the X Client
running on the Unix system. When it needs to display something, it sends a request to the
X Server running on your machine. The server processes this request and displays the
output of the game on your display. Every time you fire your laser by pressing the
spacebar, the server sends this keystroke back to the game for processing. You could have
an X Server for Mac and run your Unix apps on it. What happens is that the apps run
remotely on the Unix system, displaying their output on your machine’s X Server.
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