nathanbedford.com

Over the last couple years, I’ve read about a cool opensource keyboard/mouse sharing program called Synergy. Finally I decided to stop reading about it and start using it!

First, let me explain a bit more about Synergy. Have you ever been working on your desktop PC, with your keyboard in front of you, with your laptop sitting on the desk next to the keyboard? When you were actively using the laptop, you’d rotate your body, use the laptop keyboard and touchpad (yuck), and then spin back to the desktop keyboard and mouse when you were done with the laptop.

With Synergy, you can have your laptop set up to, say, the left side of your desktop’s monitor. To use the laptop, you’d just move your mouse over to the laptop monitor, and suddenly your keyboard and mouse (plugged into your desktop PC) would work on your laptop! Totally awesome. And free.

Here are some quick highlights:

• clipboard data gets automatically synchronized (including binary data, such as a screenshot)
• can work across different platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac)
• great performance under most circumstances

Installation

I found a decent installation article on LifeHacker, but I ran into a couple of slightly confusing issues during my own installation/configuration, so I figured others may benefit from a little guide.

First, grab the Synergy installation file.

While that’s downloading, you can decide which computer will be your main system. This is the system whose mouse and keyboard you’ll use to access all systems.

Once the installation file is done downloading, hop on your main computer (we’ll call it the Synergy server) and launch the installation file. It’s a nice little NSIS installer, so it’s simple and quick. Just accept the default options and walk right thru it (should take like 5 seconds).

Run the installer on the other computers that you’d like to control from your main keyboard/mouse.

Server Configuration

Synergy uses a configuration textfile to store configuration settings. This file tells Synergy how your computers are arranged, so Synergy knows which system you want to control when you move your mouse to, say, the far left side of your desktop’s monitor.

The version for Windows has a nice little wizard that helps you create the configuration file. Some of the configuration rules are a bit confusing, so I’ll give you some screenshots to get you going.

Launch Synergy from the shortcut on your desktop or Start menu. You’ll see a screen like this:

(I apologize for the nasty screenshost…I’ll work on fixing this soon)

Make sure you’ve got “Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse (server)” selected.

Now, click on the “Configure” button. You’ll see a screen like this:

You’ll need to first add the names of all workstations that will be using Synergy to the list of “Screens”. I know, a screen isn’t a computer…but this is how Synergy thinks, so we’ll have to just live with it

(If you don’t already know the name of your desktop, a quick way to find it is to open up a command window and type “hostname” (without the quotes) and hit enter.)

I’ll be using my desktop PC (called “falcon”) and my laptop PC (called “eagle”), so enter those names into the “Screens” list by click on the “+” button. This launches another screen:

All you need to do is enter a Screen Name (for me, that would be “falcon”, for the name of my desktop) and click “OK”. The other options don’t need to be touched for now.

Follow the same steps to add your laptop name to the screens list, so it looks like this:

Now, we move on to the slightly confusing part: Links. The link entries are required so that Synergy knows how you have your monitors arranged. In my case, I have my laptop (eagle) to the left of my desktop (falcon). Synergy needs two “Link” entries to describe this relationship. This is the part that I messed up on…I assumed that Synergy could figure out that “eagle” is to the left “falcon” if I told it that “falcon” is to the right of “eagle”. But apparently it can’t. If you don’t add both links, you’ll end up getting your mouse “stuck” on a screen.

So, here are the two Link entries I used:

Don’t forget to press the “+” button to add this Link to the list!

And the second one:

The final configuration looks like this:

Now, just press “OK” to close the “Screens & Links” form, and then press “Start” back on the first form to get the Synergy server running. You’ll see a little message telling you that Synergy was successfully started.

Client Installation

Guess what?! The client installation is an absolute piece of cake compared to the server installation.

Here what you have to do: on your client box (my laptop, in my case) find the Synergy icon (on the desktop or in the Start menu) and start Synergy. You’ll see the following screen:

Make sure the “Use another computer’s shared keyboard and mouse (client)” option is selected.

Simply type in the name of your server (in my case, “falcon”), and click “Start”. That’s it! After a couple seconds, you should be able to move your mouse from on computer to the other!

After you’ve enjoyed the magic of Synergy for a couple minutes, check out the documentation at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/. Once of the first things you’ll probably want to do is to have Synergy automatically start when your computer starts up. Click on the “AutoStart” button (see the screenshot above) to explore your options.

Have fun!