Summary: How to get X on your windows pc, using cygwin.
Date: Around 2009
Refactor: 3 January 2025: Checked links and formatting.

• Download cygwin: site
• Install cygwin (start setup)

You can keep everything default, then various standard things are installed including what you need for X. (note that you install from the internet and that many mirrors are capped. I have good experiences with the ftp mirror of the tu of dresden ftp://ftp.inf.tu-dresden.de). At a minimum you need to select the xinit package under the X11 section. This will select various other X packages. Additionally, you need to select the font-bh-dpi75 and font-bh-lucidatypewriter-dpi75 packages under the same section to prevent errors when installing certain software.

Depending on the version you can start cygwin after installation in the following way:

• C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat (older versions)
• C:\cygwin\bin\startxwin.bat (recent versions)

Note: If you don't want the shell that automatically opens, remark that line in the startxwin.bat file

REM Startup an xterm, using bash as the shell.

REM %RUN% xterm -e /usr/bin/bash -l

You can now start putty and enable X forwarding (Connection→SSH→X11→Enable X11 forwarding) to make the graphical applications of the X server work on your own pc:

Note: X is bedoeld voor snelle netwerken. Het werkt dus wel op trage internetlijnen, maar is daar niet voor bedoeld.

I couldn't get the above way working on this combination. I kept getting these errors: During installation:

xinit.sh exit code 8

And when trying to start c:\cygwin\bin\startxwin.exe (note the .exe instead of .bat) I got this:

/usr/bin/startxwin: No such file or directory <errno 2>: no server "X" in PATH

Solution: I worked around it by starting cygwin the normal way and entering the command in the shell:

c:\cygwin\cygwin.bat:

$startxwin