Running Gnome on CentOS 6.4 using remote connect doesn't work

Question

I am connecting remotely (using putty) to a VPS that's running CentOS 6.4. I tried starting the GUI by typing "startx" in the terminal and it told me the command was not found, thus I assume that this version of the OS does not have Gnome included.

I installed Gnome using the following command

yum groupinstall basic-desktop desktop-platform x11 fonts

After the installation finished I typed "startx" and the GUI began to start. It loads until I receive the error:

error setting MTTR (base = 0xf8000000, size = 0x00400000, type = 1) Invalid argument (22) 
Window 

Is this due to an incompatibility with the GUI I installed or is there another reason for this?

Answer 1

As mentioned above, the most obvious problem is that you don't have X protocol forwarding set up (X11 is a client/server system where, quite confusingly, a client is a program running sometimes on a remote machine and it communicates with an X Server which you can think of as a graphical system running on your local desktop).

You can set up Putty to forward your X connections but it is a bit involved for a newbie. Instead, consider using MobaXterm which is an out-of-the-box solution providing both X server and remote terminal facility. With it, you can SSH into your Linux box and start X programs ("clients") which will show up on your desktop.