Cruisemaniac.com » desktop http://www.cruisemaniac.com/blog Writings on Life, experiences, technology, business and my 2-cent worth try at entrepreneurship... Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:45:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Synergize your workhorses http://www.cruisemaniac.com/blog/2009/05/05/synergize-your-workhorses/ http://www.cruisemaniac.com/blog/2009/05/05/synergize-your-workhorses/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 17:30:37 +0000 The Cruisemaniac http://thecruisemaniac.com/blog/?p=285 [...]]]> A lot of us have a multi-PC setup these days. Be it at work or at home, the cables and the multiple mouses are surely a confusion!  Well, a way out exists… infact, an open-source and completely cost-free way out of the mixup exists.  Say Hello to Synergy, the opensource, multi-OS compatible Keyboard and mouse sharing application.

Download Synergy from the sourceforge website here.  Install it and have it running without a reboot.

The configuration for Synergy is very simple.

  1. You choose one of your multiple PCs / laptops on your table as your server.
    synergy-server
  2. Next up, you would need to configure the positions of the other PCs with respect to the PC acting as the Synergy Server. Eg: Laptop is to the left of PC.  EeePC to the left of Laptop.  Laptop is Right of EeePC, et al.
    synergy-screen-config
  3. Start off Synergy on the server
  4. Hook on the clients to the server by providing either the hostname of the server or the IP address  and voila..
    synergy-client
  5. You can haz one keyboard and one mouse for multiple peeceez!!! :-D

With respect to my setup as above, synergy runs on the Ubuntu desktop.  The Keyboard and mouse from the desktop is used by both the laptop and the eeePC.

For the ubuntu fellows, synergy is available in synaptic package manager. Just apt-get it as:

sudo apt-get install synergy

The package manager installs both the synergy server (synergys) and the synergy client (synergyc).  Synergy server needs a configuration file named synergy.conf which needs to be pointed to when starting the synergy server.  A very detailed help document for writing the synergy.conf file and for starting the client and server on ubuntu is here.

Well… thats that about Synergy.  Looks like i covered an app I liked a lot in pretty much good detail… and oh… yeah, you can share the clipboard across PCs… Ctrl+C on ubuntu and Ctrl+V on windowsXP! Kickass!! B-)

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