Interesting! I imagine the server might listen on a TCP port with no security, so perhaps you could just run something like "DISPLAY=1.2.3.4:0 xterm" on a *nix machine (via a separate connection/console), where 1.2.3.4 is the IP address of the DOS machine, and the xterm will appear on the DOS machine? Obviously this isn't as convenient as having a login prompt from the *nix machine appear on the DOS machine, but it's certainly how I often did things before SSH forwarding came along.

Is there anything special in that Xserver?
How does it compare to Xappeal and DesqView/X ?

I worked in a bank that had everything running on a Unix server, and we used Windows NT machines running the hummingbird software to interact with it.

Apart from using it with xterm, we used Uni center to have task control.

I never thought much about it, I assumed that it was the only available X server for Windows.

Zup wrote on 2024-08-19, 12:45:

I never thought much about it, I assumed that it was the only available X server for Windows.

I seem to remember StarNet X-Win32 being pretty popular, maybe because it had a trial or shareware version or something, and I think it was also pretty easy to use. Later I used the X server in Cygwin since it was free and open source, although I think it wasn't quite as friendly as X-Win32.

AFAIK this is the only alternative to Desqview/X that runs natively on DOS, I didn't think about just pointing it directly at the X server via DISPLAY environment variable so I guess you wouldn't need to ssh it over then...

Grzyb wrote on 2024-08-19, 12:26:

Is there anything special in that Xserver?
How does it compare to Xappeal and DesqView/X ?

I totally wasn't aware of Xappeal, I guess that's a totally different alternative. The only thing I see is possibly different X server features, although Xappeal seems newer...

I suspect you might need xfree86 r6 on a linux box rather than x.org to support it, so might need a pre ~2003ish linux distro to connect to through RSH. I think you might get hints on the oldschool setup with some old howtos, I think there was a "thin client howto", maybe an Xterminal howto that would have a lot of relevant setup info. I am not sure that is the only way to do it, just that it is the easy route to see how it's supposed to work, then you can lift and recompile stuff for a pi or modern distro. Though kernel modules work different than then so might be some rewriting, and then also some kernel archeology to determine what was taken out or broken when and why, wild amount of breakage in the 2005-2015 timeframe, and then 5 years of peace, and the barbarians were back in 2020 wrecking I mean updating things.