Introduction

Thanks to the technology advancement and the always-going-down price of personal computers, most of us ended up with 2 or more computers at home (like me, for instance, I have a desktop running on Linux - which is pretty much my download slave and a business notebook running Windows which I use in the office and at home).

Sometimes you might need to use these computers simultaneously, and trust me - using more than one set of keyboard and mouse not only troublesome, but at some point you will get frustrated, not to mention that it can get confusing when you’re trying to do too many things at once. Initially, i used VNC to remote into my second PC, but soon I find the speed of which it updates the screen starting to nibble on my short temper. I don’t want to talk about KVM, because firstly, my primary machine is a notebook, and it won’t accept any means of display input - plus always flipping through the switch can be troublesome too.

At last! Found the ultimate solution! - Synergy

After snooping around in various forums and blogs, I found a neat piece of software called “Synergy”. There’s a plenty that I liked about this software:

• It’s FREE (open source, actually)
• It’s lightweight. Only 0.88kB in download footprint
• It’s non-intrusive and not troublesome (can be run as windows/gnome services)
• And the best part - it is cross-platform. So you can technically have a Mac, PC and Linux all together sharing the keyboard and mouse

There are a few more neat things about Synergy:

• Switching between computers is as easy as moving your mouse to the direction of the monitor (Think multiple-display-like experience)
• It doesn’t lag at all
• It also copies your clipboard (yes, copy text from Windows and paste in Ubuntu FTW!

Let’s see how to set it up!

The requirements

Okay let’s get down to business. To make this work, you’ll need the following:

• Download Synergy
• At least two computers running any of these - Windows, Mac or Linux (Unix too)
• The computers must be connected to one LAN (Synergy uses TCP/IP to communicate)
• Some patience (it’s a bit confusing to set up initially)

To make things easier, let’s take a look at my PC setup:

My notebook “fird-note” is arranged to the left of my home PC’s “fird-home” in this example. Keep this arrangement in mind, so you wouldn’t get confused with the guide. Of course, you can feel free to arrange your PC to your liking!

Next, decide which PC’s keyboard you want to use. In my case, I would like to use my notebook’s keyboard and mouse. This means that I will be sharing my notebook’s keyboard and mouse with my fird-home PC.

Start Synergy on the PC that will be sharing the keyboard and mouse (of course, after installing!), you’ll see the dialog box below:

On this PC, Choose “Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse” and then click the “Configure…” button. You’ll see the screen as follows:

Under the “Screens:” section on top, click the ” + ” button, and enter the name of your main PC, followed by your other PC(s). In my case, it is “fird-note”, then followed by “fird-home” (you can leave the rest as default for the time being):

Once you’re done, your configuration screen should look like this:

Now, under the “Links” section, set it as follows (the direction depends on your setup):

Once that is done, press the ” + ” button at the bottom, and add another entry:

Press the ” + ” again to complete the add. In Summary, you need to tell Synergy how your screens are arranged, and the arrangement must be added in pair - so Synergy will know where to send the input to. You final configuration screen should look like this:

Now press “OK“. Click “Test“, a few window will pop up. Leave Synergy window open at the moment.

Slave (Client) PC configuration.

On your other PC, install Synergy. In my case, I am using Linux as my second PC, therefore setting up Synergy is as simple as:

$ sudo apt-get install synergy
(… install process …)
$ synergyc 192.168.1.111


If you are using Windows though, here’s what you should do:

Yes, choose “Use another computer’s shared keyboard and mouse (client)“, then enter the IP address of your main PC (in my case, the IP address of fird-note is 192.168.1.111).

Now, click “Test” again. If you did it right, you should see some activity in the Synergy that is running on your main PC. Try moving your mouse past the border of your monitor back and forth. If you can seem to move the mouse cursor over the other monitor, and click on anything on the screen and back, congratulate yourself, as you have successfully setup your Synergy!

Finalizing the setup

Now click the “Stop” button on the test window, and click the “Autostart…” button, and set is up as you like (I choose to activate Synergy “When Computer Starts“. Do this on both PCs.

Finally, click the “Start” button (again, on both PCs, starting with the main PC), Synergy should hide itself in the task bar (it has a small lightning icon to indicate if it is active or otherwise).

Enjoy your newfound swiftness in working with two separate computers as if it is one!

p/s: I always keep finding myself trying to drag a window into the other machine

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