Intro to PuTTy

­By: Brian Hartvigsen


PuTTy is a telnet/SSH client and xterm terminal emulator for Windows 32bit Operating Systems (which means anything but Windows 3.11 or earlier) written by Simon Tatham. It's a more user friendly version of the standard telnet client that comes with Windows operating systems and supports more features then most other SSH clients out there while not being bogged down in file size or required DLLs. Above all that, PuTTy is relatively easy to use and still quite powerful!


Before you can start using PuTTy you will need to download it. PuTTy is available from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ or you can always go to http://www.google.com and search for PuTTy, it has always been the first result for me, but no guarantees. Find the Downloads section (there should be a link in the top portion of the webpage.) You will notice many different programs available for download; all you need is the putty.exe. Once you have downloaded the putty.exe you will need to put it somewhere where you can access it quickly and easily. Since PuTTy has no configuration files, nor does it need any extra DLLs or other files, I recommend you place it on your Windows Desktop, but that's truly up to you.


To execute PuTTy, simply double click the putty.exe. You will be presented with the main PuTTy screen which should look something like so:



To access onyx enter onyx.boisestate.edu in the Host Name field and select SSH for your Protocol. Though you could use Telnet, I suggest you use SSH as it is more secure and makes things easier if you read on to the advanced usage below. You may choose to save you settings by putting a name in the Saved Sessions field and clicking Save. You will see the name appear in the box with Default Settings. From now on, all you will need to do to connect to onyx is double click the saved session. You may do that now, or click the Open button in the lower right corner of the dialog.


To find out everything you can do with PuTTy you can read the HTML documentation available at http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.53b/htmldoc/ .


Advanced Usage of PuTTy


This next bit is a little more advanced and requires other programs to work with PuTTy. I have only tested X-Win32 from StartNet and WeirdX from JCraft! What I am about to tell you will allow you to use graphical apps that are on onyx.boisestate.edu just as if you were sitting at a computer in the lab. First you will need to download an X11 Server for Windows.


Free X11 servers are available at:

Shareware X11 Servers are available at:


There may be more available, but there were the ones I found and looked at when writing this tutorial. You can always search at http://www.google.com for "X11 Server for Windows" to find other options available.


Using you X11 Server with PuTTy is a multi-step process. First, you must have the X11 Server running (most of them place icons in the system tray or show up on the taskbar.) Now open PuTTy and Load your saved session. Do not double click the session or it launches it instead of just loading the settings for us. First make sure the Protocol is SSH, this will not work with Telnet! On the Category box you will need to select Connection. This should open up some sub categories as seen above. Now select SSH and finally select Tunnels. Now check the box that says Enable X11 Forwarding. If you are using WeirdX change X Display Location to localhost:2. Now go back and Save your session again (so the X11 forwarding is on by default) and connect to onyx. You will notice you can now use programs such as gvim just as if you were sitting in the lab. Be warned, the programs will load slowly and sometimes they respond slowly too. This is normal as you are literally running a program over the internet! I do not recommend you do this unless you are using a broadband connection such as Cable, DSL, or Satellite. A dialup connection will be to slow!