X Forwarding with Putty on Windows
Intro to X ForwardingUnix machines have been able to run software on a remote machine and display the GUI locally for almost two decades. Linux and Mac OS X support X Forwarding with no extra software. Any terminal on Linux should do X Forwarding, Mac users need to run "Applications > Utilities > XTerm". In a command line terminal run "ssh -Y jdoe@compute.example.edu matlab" and you’ll be running matlab on "compute.example.edu" but seeing it on your desktop.
Windows users need two pieces of software: an secure shell program (ssh) to establish the remote connection and an X Server to handle the local display.
Prerequisites- Putty for SSH
- XWin32, or XMing with Portable PuTTY for the XServer
- Add Unix hostname
- Switch Protocol to SSH
- Type name of session in saved sessions
- Click ‘Save’
- Choose ‘Tunnels’ from ‘Category’ list
- Check ‘Enable X11 Forwarding’
- Choose ‘Session’ from ‘Category’ list
- Click ‘Save’


- Start XWin-32
- Click ‘Security’ tab
- Click ‘Add…’
- Enter ‘localhost’ without quotes and click ‘OK’
- Start XWin32
- Start Putty
- Double click on the saved session you want
- Enter username and password as requested
- You should now be able to run X applications from the host
on your local desktop

Some older versions of XWin32 require fonts to be install to run certain programs, such as Mathematica
They can be found here.