KnowUbuntu

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

Another quickie. The only email client I use is gmail. Nothing else is as good, in my opinion, especially with the keyboard shortcuts and all the “plugins” (lab features) that can be added to it. So, when I click on an email address to send an email to someone from a browser or from anywhere else on my system (you can start an email to your contacts from Gnome do) I want gmail to open to compose my emails, not Evolution or Thunderbird (or whatever else just happens to be installed at the time).

This is really simple if you use the Firefox web browser (and might be easily doable with other browsers too). Simply follow theses steps (NOTE: there is no command line (terminal) required for this tweak):

1. In Firefox open the Applications tab in Preferences (Edit / Preferences / Applications)
2. Type mailto into the search box and change the Action drop down to say Use Gmail
3. Open Preferred Applications (System / Preferences / Preferred Applications)
4. At the bottom of the Internet tab under the section Mail Reader select Custom from the drop down and type the following into the text box titled Command:firefox %s

Now no matter where you start an email action from (compose email, view email, etc) Firefox should open and a new tab should load gmail.

Enjoy!

Well, this isn’t the most useful of tweaks. Most of my spelling is done within the confines of Firefox or OpenOffice which both have good spell checking tools. Even when I am in vim/gvim :set spell works for me. But this idea stuck me as something I wanted to try and it is kind of cool.

The original poster of this does a great job of setting it up, which I will not try to replicate. Suffice it to say that after you are done with his step by step setup you should be able to spell check any text in any application you can type in and highlight.

Cool.