SSH – X Server for Windows

To mount your ftp server on the Ubuntu machine instead of copying back and forth, you could use curlftpfs. It allows you to mount a ftp server directly on to the file system of the machine.

An example (from the web-page):

$ mkdir sunet
$ curlftpfs ftp://ftp.sunet.se/ sunet/
$ cd sunet/
$ ls -l
total 0
Dr-xr-xr-x   3 root root        96 Feb 23  2004 bin
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root root        72 Mar  2  2004 dev
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root root        48 Feb 23  2004 etc
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root root       120 Feb 23  2004 lib
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 622187310 Mar 11 06:13 ls-lR
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  76389037 Mar 11 06:15 ls-lR.gz
drwxrwxr-x  37 root root      1272 Feb 27 14:17 pub
dr-xr-xr-x   3 root root        72 Feb 23  2004 usr
$ cd ..
$ fusermount -u sunet/

To forward X11 apps over your ssh connection, there needs to be something on your Windows client to which the X11 applications can connect. In other words, you need to run an X server for Windows, which will translate X11 protocol messages from the ssh connection into graphical drawing commands and send mouse and keyboard actions back across the network.

There are several options for this, one is Cygwin/X: http://x.cygwin.com/