Many of us have multiple computers on our desks. You could purchase a KVM to share your mouse and keyboard between two systems or you could download and install Quick Synergy, for FREE. QuickSynergy is a graphical interface (GUI) for easily configuring Synergy2, an application that allows the user to share their mouse and keyboard between two or more computers. Synergy2 uses the TCP-IP protocol to share the resources, even between machines with different operating systems, such as Mac OS, Linux and Windows.
The system is easy to set up. The developers provide an installer for Windows and OSX. You can also use apt-get or yum to install on most Linux systems. You need to decide which computer will be your main machine. Install Quick Synergy on all the systems. The main machine becomes your server. The others will be clients. On the main computer or the server, add the hostnames in the locations that the computers will be. The click Execute.
Next you have to set up the clients. Simply click Use and point to the clients the host or main computer.
Make sure you have port 24800 open so the client and host can communicate. This little app runs on all of my machines. It saves a lot of desk space and a lot of time.
Enjoy
My friend Brian at work has about 6 monitors on his desktop, including a laptop and an iMac, amongst other screens. He uses Synergy, and it works great, except that occasionally he’ll lose connection to the main computer, or his IP will change (even though we *supposedly* have statically assigned IPs through records in the DHCP server) and it will break. Not a big deal, he just remotes into those machines and fixes it back.
That’s a lot of monitors! How have you been doing my friend?