Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Cool toys: Synergy

In the last week or so I have been re­or­ga­niz­ing my workspace. Or rather, Rosar­i­o's workspace, and that meant mov­ing some fur­ni­ture my way.

One of the things I got is a long desk­top, with room for two PCs (it was used in the class­room in Conec­ti­va, and I got it as part of my sev­er­ance pay­men­t).

So, I put my desk­top on it, a key­board and mouse of the tray be­low, and my home serv­er on the oth­er side of it.

That home serv­er has been head­less for a loooong time.

But since I have room in the table, I hooked a mon­i­tor, key­board, mouse set to it, and thought "maybe it will work as a guest ma­chine", for when some­one comes to work or stay at my place.

Then I thought, there must be some way to use one key­board and mouse to drive both ma­chi­nes, and start­ed look­ing for KVM switch­es and stuff.

Then I thought... maybe there is a way to do it by soft­ware... and yeah! En­ter syn­er­gy ...

You run a serv­er on the box with the key­board, and a client on the oth­er­s. Ex­plain the re­la­tion­ship be­tween them in the sim­ple con­fig file... that's it.

Now I can slide the mouse off a screen to the oth­er com­put­er's, and you even share a clip­board!

Re­al­ly, re­al­ly, re­al­ly nice stuff. Works flaw­less­ly.

And since I am a bit weird in my ways, now... how can I make this work as a xin­era­ma so­lu­tion, where all the apps are in my note­book, and the oth­er is just a dis­play server?

Right now, I am start­ing a full screen FreeNX ses­sion point­ed back at me, so ev­ery­thing is on the same box. But I can't move win­dows be­tween both mon­i­tors.

I think with some cre­ative think­ing this can work. X app dis­play mi­gra­tion...

Thomas / 2006-08-17 18:54:

Have you looked into Xorg's DMX? (Distributed Multihead X) I'm sure there are also other options.

Pelle / 2006-08-17 18:59:

Yeah, Synergy is neat. Also works fine between Linux and Windows. :-)

Roberto Alsina / 2006-08-17 19:20:

ThomasÑ had never heard of DMX until now ... sounds neat

Peter Nunn / 2006-08-18 00:28:

Just got it going here a few days ago between a linux and windows box.. its fantastic.

Works much better than the DLink hardwar KVM I've been using.

Peter.


Contents © 2000-2023 Roberto Alsina