Slick Tool

[Richard Wilson]

All,

In a recent mailing from Sourceforge I came across a tool that I'd never
heard of, in spite of it being number 15 in their list of most popular
downloads.  I read the little blurb about it, tried it out and it's
going to be a real help to me so I thought I'd pass it along.

The tool is called synergy and it allows you to share a keyboard and
mouse on one system (the server) with others (the clients) --
essentially its a dynamic KM (Keyboard and Mouse) switch (each system
needs to have its own Video).  Switching is done by moving your mouse
off one screen and onto the other.  The server and clients can be Unix,
Linux, Mac OSX and most flavors of Windows (even Win 95 is supported!).

In my setup I have my server running FC4 and my client running XP (I
have to put up with Windoze for work compatability...) but being able to
use the same keyboard and mouse without a hardware switch is nice.  The
tool also supports some mouse driven cut and paste operations, which
I've already found to be very useful.

This is perhaps a tool that could be used to teach some Windows bigots
that Open Source software is a good thing -- the server and client(s)
can all be Windows...

Maybe this is old hat to you -- I'd never heard of it before and I
figured that others on this list might find it useful.  And it's slick
moving the mouse off of a Linux desktop into XP and back as needed.

Richard Wilson