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

Question

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 1

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!

Answer 2

If you want the OpenGL rendering to be performed on your local machine, using a Windows X server, like Xming is a good solution. However, if you want rendering to be done on the remote end with just images sent to the local machine, you want a specialized VNC system that can handle remote OpenGL rendering, like VirtualGL.