tail -f findings.out

It’s not much fun filling your desk with computers if you have to add in a keyboard and mouse for each one. Far cooler would be a single keyboard and mouse for any number of screens you can fit into your ken, whether their parent machines are running Linux, Windows, or Mac OSX. Who doesn’t want a ridiculous setup like Stanley’s in Swordfish? On a more practical note, this sort of setup could be indispensable for testing or running platform-specific programs, if virtual machines aren’t practical.

Features

And it’s easy to do using Synergy. One machine is setup as a Synergy server, and as many others as you want connect via TCP/IP as clients. Once this is place, the keyboard and mouse of the master can be used on the clients, simply by dragging the mouse from the server’s monitor to the client’s, in a direction you set. A shared clipboard is also added, so you can cut and paste text across machines. Files can’t be transferred, but the setup is still quite useful. This page provides a more detailed overview.

Setup

This page describes how to setup the server and the client on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It’s quite straightforward:

• On the master (the machine with a keyboard and mouse you can easily reach), install the Synergy server. System requirements (while paltry) are listed here. This page should link to the download options (not entirely positive, as Sourceforge is somewhat broken right now).
• Next configure the server. On Windows this is through a configuration dialog, on *nix/OSX you do it through a text file (also see QuickSynergy below). This is additional useful, as you can put your synergy.conf in a VCS.
• Start the server
• Connect with a client
• Enjoy!

Security

One thing you might see noted frequently is that this setup is not secure. Indeed it is not, but it can be made so. However, if you are just connecting machines on your own LAN, and you have a firewall in place on the machines, or at least on the router or whatever is between you and the internet, I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.

QuickSynergy

QuickSynergy was developed as a Synergy GUI configuration tool for Linux and Mac OSX, as only the Windows packages comes with one. Their homepage has installation and use instructions, as well as a video guide.