RSSSynergy: Two computers – One desktop
Put together on July 31, 2007 2:03 pm by Thomas
1 Comment
I recently discovered (thanks to Matt Cutts) a very cool piece of software: Synergy. This is a blessing for all those who have more than one computer (with monitor) and would like to use both of them with one mouse and keyboard. Synergy does just that, joining the desktops of more than one computer allowing you to move the mouse cursor from one to the other. Of course it’s not possible to drag windows from one computer to the other, so it’s not the same effect as having two monitors on the same computer. But that doesn’t mean that the software does not provide an excellent solution for people with more than one computer.
My main desktop is a Windows machine and I also have a laptop running Ubuntu (and a Mac mini because I just need to have something Apple in my house – but let’s not get into that). The laptop is placed slightly higher than the desktop for a better viewing angle which makes it very hard to type (although granted, I didn’t use to type often). Installation is very simple. I followed Matt’s instructions in this post and set up the Synergy server in Ubuntu, and I run the client from Windows. It worked well but it as it uses the server’s mouse and keyboard, the choice was inconvenient for me (I should have really read Matt’s whole post before I started playing with Synergy). So I switched the server to Windows and the client in Ubuntu. And it worked like a charm.
The only problem I have is that when I play World of Warcraft in Windows and I move the cursor to the Linux desktop, WoW minimizes to the taskbar. I haven’t spent too much time with it so I’m pretty sure I’ll find a way to fix it.
The implementation is done very, very well, especially considering that it runs in all versions of Windows (almost), Linux and Mac. The communication between the computers, as you may have suspected, takes place over the network and you need to configure the IPs of the computers into the server and the client software.
This is a precious piece of software that I’ve been looking for some time now. It being open source is icing on the cake.
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I received a few emails with questions regarding WoW minimizing issue. The answer is to click “Options…” and check “Don’t take foreground window on Windows servers.”