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Wednesday, 15 November 2006

syngergize!

Damn, this is cool! Where was this when I had four computers on my desk in my dorm room, with four monitors, four mice, and one keyboard hooked to a shitty, old school, mechanical switch box? Synergy would have been the shit in that situation.

Basically, synergy is a tcp/ip based keyboard/mouse server. A sort of software-KVM if you will (minus the V). It allows you to control multiple machines with one keyboard and mouse, over the network. This is perfect if you have multiple displays for different machines, but would rather not have multiple input devices covering your workspace. Multiple monitors with a single keyboard and mouse was always my favorite way to manage multiple machines from one spot. I find it much more useful to switch input control between displays so you can still see what the other machines are doing while you are controlling a different one.

Especially cool about synergy are the available methods of switching control to different boxes, and the shared clipboard. You can switch to the next machine simply by rolling the cursor past the screen edge towards the next display, and/or assign key shortcuts. Shared clipboard means you can copy text (and in some cases graphics and other data) on one machine and paste it on another.

Finally, this thing is cool as hell because it is cross-platform. I've setup my linux box as the server, and I'm using it to control the Vista RC1 box, and Mac OS X machines on my desk. As I move the mouse to the right, the cursor moves from my Linux monitor, to windows, to the iMac; and after traversing screens back to the left I end up where I started. Snout!

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