General Information

SSH display forwarding is a way of tunnelling the X Window protocol, which is network transparent by design, over an SSH tunnel.
Click here to see how it compares to the other protocols.
There are many SSH implementations, many of which are open-source.
Since this method uses the X Window system, the server operating system must support X servers, therefore it does not run on Microsoft Windows. That does not preclude you from using the client on those systems and starting X sessions on other X capable servers.
Note: some operating systems disable forwarding by default (ie: Mac OS X), please refer to your operating system vendor to enable this SSH feature. (Generally that means setting X11Forwarding to true in your sshd_config)

Features

Window Switch sessions using SSH display forwarding do not support any of the usual features!
Sessions cannot be suspended or resumed, and running full desktops is not recommended (disabled by default).
SSH sessions cannot be recovered when the network connection to the server drops.

Links

• SSH display forwarding howto
• X window system (wikipedia)
• OpenSSH.com (see also on Wikipedia)
• Secure Shell on Wikipedia has much more information and links