rootninja

Synergy

Synergy may be defined as two or more entities working together to produce a result individually unobtainable.

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, (and here’s the key part) without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers and monitors on their desk.

One mouse, one keyboard, controlling multiple Windows, Linux, and Mac systems. I’ve been looking for something like this for years!

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all. Learn more about how it works.

I’ve used it between two Fedora 12 machines, one a laptop the other a desktop, and it worked flawlessly. There is no delay when moving between desktops, no stutter, or lag in the mouse movement or keyboard input. It just works. But that was just multiple Linux machines. Good luck getting Windows and Mac to work, right? No problem! Synergy to the rescue.

Synergy+

http://code.google.com/p/synergy-plus

Described by its creators as “…a maintenance fork for implementing bug fixes to the original Synergy by Chris Schoeneman…”

Both Synergy and Synergy+ use the same configuration and the same synergys and synergyc daemons to connect.

If you want to try it between multiple machines, you just need to make a simple config similar to this, and put it on the one computer you designate as the server:

section: screens
  computer1:
  computer2:
end

section: aliases
  computer1:
    192.168.1.11
  computer2:
    192.168.1.12
end

section: links
  computer1:
    right = computer2
  computer2:
    left = computer1
end

You could define corners and get more specific than this, but if both displays are next to each other and they’re the same size, you shouldn’t need anything more than left and right.

Btw, The server would be the one with the keyboard and mouse physically attached…

Run synergys (the server daemon) pointing to your configuration file on one computer. You can run it as your regular desktop user too Then run the synergyc (client daemon) on the other computer and give it the ip address of the server computer.

If you run the daemons automatically on startup, you won’t need more than one keyboard or mouse on your desk unless you need to get into the bios or boot from a live dvd distribution. But even then, just run the client on your new installation and you’re up and running since clients don’t need to know anything about configurations. They just need to know where the server is.

You’ll probably need to install a few prerequisite packages, including:
* libstdc++
* compat-libstdc++-296 (for libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3)

There’s also a GUI wrapper:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm/

SynergyKM is a GUI wrapper around the synergy command line tool that lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems without special hardware