Linux in a Windows World

Windows Remote-Login Tools

If Windows systems are to interact with Linux systems via text-mode tools, you must locate matching Windows clients to Linux servers or locate Windows servers for Linux clients. The first task is considerably easier and likely to be more productive than the second; although text-mode Windows login servers do exist, they aren’t nearly as useful as Linux remote text-mode login servers because Windows was never designed with this sort of operation in mind.

Locating Client Software

Windows client software for both Telnet and SSH protocols is fairly easy to find. In fact, all versions of Windows that support TCP/IP networking ship with a Telnet client. Type TELNET in a DOS prompt window or select the Telnet item from the Start menu to launch this client.

If you’re not satisfied with the features of the standard Windows Telnet server or if you want to use SSH to access your Linux system, you’ll need to look elsewhere. One excellent resource is the Free SSH web site’s Windows page, http://freessh.org/windows.html, which lists Windows SSH clients and servers, of both the free and the pay variety. Many of these SSH clients can also handle Telnet and other protocols, so they’re well worth investigating.

As an example of a Windows text-mode login client, consider PuTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/). This program can handle rlogin, Telnet, and SSH protocols. When you first launch it, you’ll see a PuTTY Configuration dialog box, as shown in ...