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I have just installed Xming on a Windows 7 Ultimate system. I have another machine on the LAN running Ubuntu and am trying to have its X11 apps appear on the Windows system.

This has worked in the past but I have now reformatted the Windows system and the Linux machine cannot connect to it, despite Windows firewall having the necessary rules to permit connections.

  1. On Windows, I start Xming - tray icon appears as expected
  2. On the Linux machine, I run this from a terminal: DISPLAY=192.168.0.10:0 lxmusic & (where 192.168.0.10 is the IP of the Windows box)
  3. I expect lxmusic to 'appear' on my Windows desktop, but instead I see (lxmusic:5645): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: 172.20.52.5:0 on my terminal, and lxmusic exits

Things I have already tried: - I have verified that the IP stated is the correct IP for the Windows machine - I have tried adding the Xming rules for Windows firewall to different network profiles (Public, Home, etc), though Windows sees the LAN as its 'home' network

Having forgotten how I had this working before I cannot think what else to try.

(I am fully aware that sending X11 traffic over the network in the clear poses a security risk and am ignoring that risk.)

Jonny
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1 Answers1

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Found the answer.

I found that I could telnet from the Linux machine to the Windows machine no problem (telnet 192.168.0.10 6000), so I was looking in the wrong place, the problem was not with the firewall.

As mentioned here (under Access Control) Xming has its own access control to prevent unauthorised connections. By default Xming will only allow connections from localhost.

To correct this I simply added the IP address of my Linux machine to C:\Program Files (x86)\Xming\X0.hosts and now things work as expected. :-)

Jonny
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  • I also had this working under previous versions of Linux and Windows, and never had to edit the Windows `hosts` file, but this fixed it for me. Well done tracking it down! – Stephen Hosking Jun 18 '13 at 09:55
  • Alternatively Xming also installs a desktop utility called XLaunch for configuring the X11 session. In Xlaunch you can set an option under "specify parameter settings" (3rd screen of the wizard) to "Disable Server access control". Of course you should only use this option if you are ok with the potential security risk. Thanks for sharing. – windsor Jul 05 '14 at 17:05