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Let me start off by just giving you a really good link for what I am about to talk about. Ready? SynergyHowto. There, now lets begin.

At work I have two computers working for me; a desktop (with a 30in monitor!) and a laptop. I place my laptop next to my monitor on my desk so that I can easily see and access it if I need to.

As you can imaging, I started to get really annoyed at having to move my hands and arms from one keyboard/mouse to the next to use both computers. What if I could just the same keyboard and mouse for both computers? Enter Synergy.

Put simply synergy is a keyboard and mouse sharing system. Synergy has both a client and a server application. The server is installed on the system that you want to share your mouse and keyboard from. The clients are installed on any other number of computers that you would like to control with that same keyboard and mouse. The only requirement is that the systems be on the same network. Easy.

The setup takes a little (and I mean little) work. You must state in the config file which computer is the server and which are the clients. Also you must specify where each computer is with respect to each other computer. For example, in my setup my 30in sits right in front of me and my laptop sits to the right. In my config file I specify that the desktop is left of the laptop and that the laptop is right of the desktop. At first this seemed a little redundant, but it works so I can’t complain.

Anyway, if you have a situation like this, were you would like to control more than one computer with one mouse and one keyboard, give synergy a try.

By the way, on Ubuntu 9.10 (and I believe in older versions) you can just install it by typing the following (this will install synergys (synergy server) and synergyc (synergy client): sudo apt-get install synergy