intelliLinux A blog about Innovation and Information

It's a common problem for plenty of techie type people, or at least it is for me: i find myself with about 5 computers on my desk, and i want to see every screen. Of course, in this instance, a KVM is not really a great option, but I also don't want to have 5 keyboards to choose between. Another common scenario is when I have to use my laptop and a desktop computer simultaniously, and a third all too frequent desire is to be able to cut and paste between multiple machines. There is a solution that solves all of these problems, and is completely cross-platform to boot: Synergy.

Synergy is an application that lets you use the keyboard and mouse on one computer to control another computer or computers just as if you were using a multimonitor setup. It supports copy and paste from one machine to another, and is completely native on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It doesn't require installation to run properly, so you can easily use it on locked down computers at school or work to use your single keyboard on your laptop without even running cables or installing anything. The only requirement for synergy to run is network access between all the machines.
Windows and OSX have gui interfaces that allow easy setup, and linux does not, however all three use the exact same config file format, and configuration isn't really needed on any machine but the machnie sharing it's keyboard/mouse.