Share one set of mouse and keyboard among multiple computers

FYI: The original Synergy project by Chris Schoenemann and the maintenance fork Synergy+ finally merged. Here’s the new web site: http://synergy-foss.org/

Most of you might remember those bulky switching-boxes to use one set of mouse,keyboard(,monitor,…) for several computers. It’s not that long time ago, that I was considering writing some kind of software hub for this purpose (mouse and keyboard only) using an ethernet connection. But this shapes up not to be necessary any longer.

Chris Schoeneman et al. did already implement this feature for various platforms and called it Synergy. It is even said to support copy & paste among different computers. Hear that? C’n'P among different machines running different OS! All my dreams come true. There’s lots of documentation, tutorials and howtos out there – you’ll see, it’s incredibly simple to use. There is a bunch of links to some of these documents at the end of the article.

Actually, this already IS the end of the article, because I want to try Synergy, now. Instead of giving a tutorial of how to configure and use this great application, I’ll leave you with the following links, as they accomplish that task very well.

External References for installing/downloading/configuring/using Synergy:

• Synergy @ SourceForge.net (en)
• Quick Start Guide (en)
• Configuring Synergy (en)
• Onli presents Synergy (de) (inspired me to write this post)
• HowTo (de)

Update:

Just set up the whole thing. Works great incl. C’n'P under Linux. Using different OS (Windows & Linux) is still to be tested. To get you started, I posted my configuration file which I saved as ~/.synergy.conf on the server as well as on the client:

section: screens
  sibi:
  sibi-mobileII:
end

section: links
  sibi:
    right = sibi-mobileII
  sibi-mobileII:
    left  = sibi
end

section: aliases
  sibi:
    192.168.0.2
  sibi-mobileII:
    192.168.0.100
end

section: options
  # Enable double-tap
  switchDoubleTap = 1000
end

The only interesting part is the last section. By configuring DoubleTap, you need to ‘knock’ on the screen’s edge twice before  the screen is changed. This prevents you from accidentally switching the screen.

Update2 & rating:

Update: When messing around in a conf-file, consider that Synergy seems to be a bit sensitive against empty rows within a section.

Rating: Now, that I’ve played a while with my new toy, I can do some judgement. With few words: it’s not working flawlessly but very well. If there was something like a rating, Synergy would achieve about 95%. Mouse movement tends to be bit laggy on the client machine from time to time. There seems to be an option to only transmit the changes of mouse position instead of absolute coordinates. Maybe this might improve things.

Suspecting Synergy to produce high traffic proved to be false. Though wireshark is freaking out while the mouse cursor is operating the client machine, the overall load seems to be around 12-25 kB/s. So not a big deal, even for a wireless connection.

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Tags: Linux, share keyboard and mouse, Software Hub, Synergy, Windows