How can I run an OpenGL application installed on a linux machine from my windows machine?

scubabbl picture scubabbl · Sep 20, 2008 · Viewed 16.3k times · Source

In the spirit of being helpful, this is a problem I had and solved, so I will answer the question here.

Problem

I have:

An application that has to be installed on on Redhat or SuSE enterprise.

It has huge system requirements and requires OpenGL.

It is part of a suite of tools that need to operate together on one machine.

This application is used for a time intensive task in terms of man hours.

I don't want to sit in the server room working on this application.

So, the question came up... how do I run this application from a remote windows machine?

I'll outline my solution. Feel free to comment on alternatives. This solution should work for simpler environments as well. My case is somewhat extreme.

Answer

scubabbl picture scubabbl · Sep 20, 2008

Solution

I installed two pieces of software:

PuTTY

XMing-mesa The mesa part is important.

PuTTY configuration

Connection->Seconds Between Keepalives: 30
Connection->Enable TCP Keepalives: Yes

Connection->SSH->X11->Enable X11 forwarding: Yes
Connection->SSH->X11->X display location: localhost:0:0

Lauching

Run Xming which will put simply start a process and put an icon in your system tray. Launch putty, pointing to your linux box, with the above configuration. Run program

Hopefully, Success!