emacs and putty on windows 7

Question

My workstation was recently updated to Windows 7. I've downloaded putty and have configured it to the same settings I had under Vista.

Whenever I ssh to a vm running Centos 5.4 and try to run emacs on a file, I'm getting an error about a connection to an X server:

[ecto1 ~]$ emacs foo.bar
Connection lost to X server `localhost:10.0'

I never received this error message when I had Vista. I can get around it by aliasing emacs to 'emacs -nw', but I don't feel that I should have to do this.

My co-worker has the same hardware that had the same upgrade and his sessions do not seem to be doing this.

Any advice? I can't find anything on google and don't know where else to start.

[ecto1 ~]$ emacs -version
GNU Emacs 21.4.1

Answer 1

Assuming that you do not want to run emacs as a client to an X server, double check your Putty configuration under Connection/SSH/X11 and make sure that "Enable X11 forwarding" is unchecked.

Answer 2

Double check your PuTTy settings and make sure that the X11 Session is being forwarded properly and you have a X11 server running locally. If you don't want to have the GUI window opened, running emacs -nw is the best alternative.

The default behavior for emacs is to try to open a GUI window. If you don't have X11 properly forwarded with a X11 Window Manager (like Hummerbird eXceed) running locally, the program will fail.