Cygwin and XFree86 on a MS Windows Machine |
When working from a MS Windows machine and accessing a remote Unix machine such as Universe (formerly Cosmos and Eric) it is often convenient or necessary to have "Unix-software" installed locally. Cygwin and XFree86 offer freely-downloadable utilities which satisfy these requirements: Cygwin includes Unix-like command-line Telnet, FTP and SSH/SCP clients, and in addition XFree86, a free implementation of X-Windows which can be used (perhaps in conjunction with the Gnome installation on Cosmos) to give a complete graphical desktop run from the remote Unix machine. The separate documentation Accessing Universe describes how XFree86 may be used to achieve this.
(eXceed is a notable alternative implementation of X-Windows and is supported by ISD at UMIST. However, experiment indicates that using Gnome on Cosmos to run a graphical desktop on you local MS Windows machine works better with XFree86 than eXceed --- some applications sometimes crash under eXceed owing to font-related problems.)