I read last week about Synergy and it seems pretty cool.
Any Dopers already using it? Is it as cool as it seems?
I am now!
It’s great. I regularly run two computers, and have been getting shoulder cramps from looking at my second screen all the time. I didn’t want to remote desktop to it, because the whole point is that I need all the screen real estate.
With synergy, I can put the two monitors side by side, and don’t have to worry about two keyboards/mice/etc.
Thanks for the link!
Happy to help, Athena. Any chance to do a good deed for an Olympian and a Who song is cool by me. 
So it works as advertised?
What is its advantage over remote desktop with regards to screen real estate?
I know you weren’t asking me, but I would assume that it essentially gives you the same benefits of a dual-monitor set up, but with the added benefit of two separate machines doing all the processing. If you need, for instance, to work on one application while seeing another one on screen at the same time.
Yes, it works as advertised.
And KneadToKnow is right; it lets you use two monitors, but only one keyboard/mouse.
Remote Desktop does something similar, but it uses the same monitor, too. So you have to be windowing between one computer and the other. Sometimes this is just fine, but there’s other situations where I’d rather have two separate monitors.
I have an L-shaped desk, and I have my main computer set up in the corner of the L, and the other computer on the short side of the L, to my right. To use the second computer, I would either have to swivel my chair and sit facing that computer, or turn my torso to look at the monitor and type/mouse on the second keyboard.
I know I should swivel the chair, but most of the time I use the torso turning trick, which leaves me with a sore shoulder if I do it too much.
Now with Synergy, I have my monitors side by side, and I can just go from one to the other, no swivel/torso turn required. MUCH better on the ol’ shoulder.
OH - one more thing - I like the cut & paste as well. Cut and Paste using remote desktop is problematic. So far, Synergy works all the time.
Awesome! Thanks for the review, Athena!
My thing is, I’m tired of going back and forth between keyboards. There’s no easy way on my desk at home to lay the keyboards out so they match the arrangement of my monitors, so even though the monitors are more or less side-by-side, my keyboards are one in front of the other. Consequently, when I get really focussed on something I’m trying to do on one computer and kind of loose track of where my hands are, I’m prone to use the wrong keyboard and wind up messing up something I didn’t want to mess up.
I’ll definitely be giving Synergy a try. And since the two computers in question are XP and Ubunutu, I’ll report back how it does in a mixed-OS environment also.
I think I’m still not getting it. I have two monitors, and I frequently use remote desktop to put another machine (like one from the downstairs lab) onto my left monitor, and keep my right monitor on my local machine.
Oh wait, is the difference that with the Synergy configuration the second monitor is still physically connected to the remote machine? So you don’t need a graphics card that supports two monitors?
Correct. Two PCs, both alike in dignity, on your fair desktop*, where we lay our scene. Only through software magic, you can use one keyboard/mouse to control them both.
- In this context, I’m using “desktop” in the literal sense.
OK, I get it. Sounds like if you have a machine that doesn’t support two monitors, then that’s a pretty useful solution.
I haven’t used that particular arrangement, but until recently, I typically had 2 or 3 computers on my main desk, but only one mouse and display screen. I just used a multi-position hardware switch designed for that purpose. But this was in the pre-USB days when keyboards and mice had custom inputs. It worked well.
I think it’s better than Remote Desktop. Remote Desktop is slow, at least on my network, and I never can seem to get the cut & paste working all the time, and the screen sizes never quite match with the monitor I’m using, and I also tend to pile up windows so I wouldn’t have a nice clean second monitor just running remote desktop - noooo, I’d have IM and Twitter and CivIV running over there too, because I’m like that.
This way, second computer stays second computer and is nice & handy to look things up on when I’ve got all that other crap running on first computer.
Tomorrow my Mac will be here, so I can load that one up as well. Whoohoo!
I’m very curious to know how it works with the Mac. Be sure to keep us posted!
Works fine on the Mac. The only issue is that there’s no GUI for configuration, so it’s a bit of a pain to get up and running. I thought Macs were supposed to be so easy that I could just THINK about having my keyboard work with it and it’d magically work!
Once I got the thing running, it was fine. I even have a bit of an odd setup - the Mac itself doesn’t have a monitor, it’s just doubled up with my main monitor. So to switch to it, I set up a hotkey. All works great.
Now I just gotta go figure out how the hell to write a batch file - I mean, shell script - on a mac that I can just click on to start synergy, since a fookin’ GUI is too much to ask for.
I’m probably setting my PCs up tomorrow. It’s been a week of exhaustion for me, what with a 15-inning All Star game and all. I was going to do it this morning, but then I had to run out and take care of other stuff.
Well, it took longer to get around to than I expected, but I finally set up Synergy last night. Getting it configured in Ubuntu was kind of tricky. It downloads as an RPM package and then I had to use something called Alien to convert it to a Debian package that Ubuntu could install. Which, alas, left me completely unknowing to where it installed, so I couldn’t configure it.
So then I wound up installing a front end for it someone has written for Ubuntu, which seems to work fine.
However, the instructions for setting it up to autoload after a reboot are vague at best, so I’m going to have to do some more research to figure that out. Fortunately, the only time I ever reboot M5 is after an update requires it.