Do you know XMing?

Sometime ago I was thinking to buy a Sun Sparc workstation. I always liked the Sun Blade 1000/2000 series but the last year the prices of Blade 1500/2500 were going down. Now you can buy a Sun Blade 2500 very cheap.

But before buy a new machine -and look for space at home- I decided to play a little more with my Sun Fire V120. I have a PGX32 VGA card for it and changued the fans for a new low noise ones but what I wanted to do is to connect to the server with an X server.

A quick search in the web and I found an small list of X servers for Windows (I have Vista on my laptop), most of them paid systems with a lot of functions. One of them is free: XMing. This is a very little tool but very useful. Just install XMing on your Window machine and you can connect to the server. More info here.

I didn't need any special cofiguration n the V120: it was reinstalled with the latest Sun Solaris -sorry, Oracle Solaris now- at the end of 2010 and nothing more was done.

The process of open a new connection is very easy:

 - Start XLaunch. At the first screen I choose 'One Window'. The display number must be 10.

  - At the second screen select 'Open session via XDMCP'.

 The next step is to indicate the server address. Type the ip address of  the server or select "Search" if you only have one.

  - I leave the "additional parameters" values as default.

  - Now you can save the configuration in a file to reuse it (I saved it on the desktop to use as a fast link).

And here you are my Solaris login screen on my laptop

This is not a fast way to work with an Sparc workstation but it's enough to play with Java desktop or CDE: