Case 1: You have a Mac at home

First you need to install the X11 utility on your Mac. This utility should be on the Install Disk you received with your Mac. Follow the steps listed at this URL for full details: http://developer.apple.com/opensource/tools/runningx11.html

Run the X utility. It will open up a window that looks just like a terminal window. Minimize it to keep it out of sight.

Open a terminal window, and connect to beowulf (or whatever Linux/XGrid computer you want to work on) using the following syntax:

 ssh -Y  334a-xx@beowulf.csc.smith.edu

The -Y is key here: it tells the remote server that its X-window commands should be send to the client, and not to a screen.

Enter your password. You can now invoke applications that have a GUI directly from the command line. Below is an example where I executed the program xeyes and got it to display on my Mac desktop.

Case 2: You have Windows at home

In this case you need two pieces of software: Xming and Portable-Putty.

XMing allows one to export the display of a Linux machine onto a Windows PC.

Note, both of these applications are "portable" and can be copied to a USB-memory stick and run on any machine you may have access to.

Edit the X0.host file in the Xming directory, and add the IP address of the Linux computer(s) you will be connecting to. For beowulf, it's 131.229.72.10

Launch Xming and select the style you wish to display the X server output. Hint: Select Multiple Windows and your X applications will look like they were launched from Windows. Leave Display number set to 0

On Server Options, check the box title Disable Server Control. Leaving the box unchecked can give you an "unspecified protocol error" later down the road.

Click Next and save your configuration. This will create a quick way to launch Xming later.

Enter the address of the machine you are trying to connect to. Be sure to select SSH as the protocol. Enter the address using the following syntax:

            334a-xx@beowulf.csc.smith.edu

Before you start working and calling X-applications on the command line, you have to tell the Linux system you are working on (beowulf) to send the GUI stuff to your machine. For this you need the IP address of your Windows machine (which you can get by typing ipconfig /all from the command window. For example, assuming that your Windows IP address is 123.456.789.001

DISPLAY=123.456.789.001:0.0
export DISPLAY

If everything is going correctly your Ubuntu box will say nothing back when you enter these commands.

xeyes &

(or xclock &) and eyes (or an analog clock) should appear.