What Noisy Cats Are We

Synergy is an Open Source utility that allows you to share your keyboard and mouse between multiple computers.  It’s  like a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) swtich, but without the V, and without the hardware.  It’s free, and it works great!  I liked having multiple monitors and multiple systems on my desk, but I always hated the multiple keyboards and mice.  Now I have my desktop LCD monitor and my laptop sitting next to each other and both are controlled by my Microsoft Media Keyboard 3000 (I’m not a MS fan but this works really well and was only $30) and my Logitech V220 wireless mouse.

To get running, you’ll need to first download Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net) and install on each of the machines that you are going to use it on.  Installation is easy.  After that, just set up one machine as the ’server’ and the other as the ‘client’.  My keyboard and mouse are plugged into my desktop PC, so that’s my ’server’ and then I set up the laptop to communicate with the server.  It’s really pretty easy.

The initial setup took a few minutes to figure out, but the keyboard and mouse are plugged into the desktop, and Synergy is running on both machines.  All I have to do is scroll off to the right of my desktop screen and I’m on the laptop.  I was expecting some keyboard and mouse lag on the laptop due to Synergy running over the LAN, but it works GREAT.  No lag or issues at all so far.

The software also works on Macs and Linux based machines, so you can control a PC and a Mac that you have sitting next to each other if you want to.  Very useful.

Thanks to TechRepublic for posting a video blog entry about it!  I never thought this type of thing existed but it’s exactly what I wanted.

My new work desk setup, complete with the two systems (well, technically 8 with the virtual machines running…):