I don’t know if your work environment is like mine, but as I look around my desk, I see this:
Two monitors Six computers (two laptops, four desktops) Four keyboards and mice The usual mess of a sysadmin
Now, if you’re like me, all this clutter is darn annoying and inconvenient. Move this keyboard and mouse so that you can use this other one… now move everything back… can’t use your favorite keyboard on this PC… etc, ad nauseum.
Now imagine that you’ve tried some solutions. You’ve tried the VNC and Remote Desktop thing. You just can’t dig how slow the screens respond, the color pallette corruption, and the general nastiness of trying to push an entire display of colors across the network.
Now imagine you have the solution. And you don’t need to imagine anymore.
It’s Synergy. One keyboard. One mouse. Multiple monitors. I used it all night for the first time last night while working.
How. Dang. Cool.
Move my mouse pointer over to the next monitor, and just start typing in a window on my Linux box, using the keyboard atached to my Windows box. Copy and Paste works seamlessly, almost as if they are the same machine. Now that I’ve worked this way, well… there’s probably no going back 🙂 Since the video is native on both machines, it’s as responsive as being on the box.
Sometimes you run across a tool so nifty, you just have to share…
Stuff that doesn’t work: For some reason, on my Linux client, my cursor keys don’t work right in Firefox text boxes, like the one I’m writing in now, but they work fine everywhere else (terminal windows, mail program, etc.)
A big bonus to this setup, for me, is because I run SO DARN MANY applications, I tend to bog one system down. Now I can let Windows get by with just running IE and LookOut, with all my terminal windows and other stuff running on my smokin’-fast Linux box.
Dig it.
I’m sold
We have a spare mac sitting around the office I’ve been wanting to get on my desk for testing, etc…
I’m going to give this a try.
Security
The important caveat is that it has nothing to do with security. So if you want a secure link, you have to tunnel the protocol over something like ssh. Also, you only restrict clients by the name they gave their screen, so if someone can guess the name of a remote screen, and attach as that remote screen, they could attach to your session.
Makes a good case for firewalls, and apparently the server can just listen on the loopback, so if you’re using ssh, there’s just about zero risk.
I goofed around with something earlier… I ran a VNC session from my Linux box as a window on my Windows box. I was also running Synergy. It was weird. I could go to the Linux-window on my Windows desktop and watch my mouse move around on my Linux monitor, or I could Synergy over to my Linux desktop and then watch stuff happen via the VNC display on my Windows desktop. Kind of creepy, actually.
My one irritation is that my client screen is to the right of my server screen, so a lot of times when I intend to drag the scroll bar of a maximized window, I end up Synergizing over to my other monitor. There’s a very slight delay (250ms) that I may adjust upwards to about half a second to make this happen less…
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Matthew P. Barnson
buffer?
I wonder if a buffer could be put between each screen. Something of a neutral zone where you aren’t quite on the next screen when you scroll off of the current screen.
Buffer…
Yeah, it’s built in… it’s a time delay that you have to “hold” your mouse against the edge before it switches over. About 700ms works well for me: long enough that I don’t do it accidentally, short enough that it’s not an annoying wait.
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Matthew P. Barnson