Synergical Computer Control

Most people have probably seen pictures of people running a PC with multiple monitors. Giving them lots of desktop real estate. There are plenty of studies out there that point out the productivity benefits of this type of working. Seeing two sets of information at once can be really helpful, work in Dreamweaver on one screen and have your web page previewed in Firefox on another (yes I know Dreamweaver has a preview but nothing beats running it in a true web browser). The next step up from that is some one like me, I run two computers some of the time at home. I have my nice quick Windows box and then I have my flash iMac for fun. It can be quite useful at times to have multiple machines to use the processing power from as I am a constantly multi-tasking. With my two computers running I can use one to do do the processing for my day job while the other is still free to use for web surfing, blog posting, emailing and any other past time I might have.

The down side usually of running two computers, having to have two keyboards and two mice. PC Desktop real estate might not be an issue what with virtual desktops and such but physical desktop space is another matter. Most of us don’t have space for multiple keyboards and mice. I tried the obvious solution of having some form of VNC between the two. This worked quite well to some extent. I could use the same keyboard and mouse on both machines how ever it meant one machine must have a window open showing the remote connection which can be a pain in the ass in all honesty.

What I wanted was a solution where I could take the mouse off of one screen and have it appear on the edge of the next one across. The obvious answer to this is using a KVM switch, its the easiest way to implement it at least. The problem with a KVM, there is a cost, and its kinda a black box. I like to have some control over what’s happening. Plus I would much rather do this by software if I can. There are a few software KVM solutions out there KaVoom springs to mind, but most of them come at a cost (and tend to work on only one of the OS brands). A little google searching however provided the answer, Synergy.

Synergy is an open source KM software switch. With Synergy I can move my mouse and keyboard focus from one screen to another simply by sliding my mouse off of one edge. It works quite happily on Windows and OS X (havent tried Linux as yet but it should work there too). One machine acts as the server, sharing it’s keyboard and mouse with the other computers. The really great thing is the cross platform side of things. I can share the keyboard and mouse on my iMac and use them to control my PC without unplugged them from one and switching to the other. As an added bonus, if I copy some text on one machine I can paste it somewhere on the other machine using normal copy and paste comands, it doesnt allow file transfer in the same way but with shared folders thats not really a problem.

Posted by Andy May 2008

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