I’ve got a new toy. Actually its a new PC built by my own hands. The main reasons for getting it are to run a bunch of databases for development work and to have a system to play with linux. Its got an AMD Athlon X2 2300 BE and 4 Gig of memory mainly for all of the Oracle databases I sometimes need to run. I’m using the 64 bit version of CENTOS 5 and the 64 bit version of Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition. The installation went pretty smoothly once I’d got the correct libraries loaded, but then I have put Oracle onto Linux before so I new what to look for.
The new PC is mainly going to run headless so I want to connect from my work PC (which runs Windows XP) and be able to control apps such as Oracle dbca (Database Configuration Assistant). Now I has read a bit about forwarding X windows over ssh so the question was how to get an X Windows session running over ssh on a Windows laptop.
The answer was to use Innotek’s VirtualBox to run Ubuntu on top of Windows XP and open an X Session over ssh to the new PC and then run dbca……and it works! The picture shows dbca running from the server in Ubuntu on Windows XP.
A slightly less heavy way would be to install the XMing X server for windows, and forward using that, which saves having to run a whole other OS on top of your existing OS.
Xming – http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/
In this method, you SSH in, and forward the X11 display to your machine, and then any application you run from your SSH session will magically appear on your Windows machine as if it were running on that machine.
(X is pretty damn clever when it comes to stuff like this, IMHO)