Solo Technology

Synergy is just about one of the slickest apps in the world if you have multiple monitors on your desk — or a laptop next to your desktop for that matter. What’s it do? It (relatively) easily allows you to use one machine’s keyboard and mouse to control both machines.

Oh yeah - for free.

To be clear, it manages Keyboard and Mouse, not Video as well.

I’ve looked at a lot of these things over the last few months and this is the one that really seems to handle it the best for me. I work from home a lot and have my laptop (primarily work) sitting next to my home desktop. As the home desktop has more “horsepower” and a bigger monitor, I like to use it more often. With having to switch back and forth from one keyboard/mouse to the other I get extra “arm stress”… no more of that now!

From their site:

synergy: [noun] a mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all.
Synergy is open source and released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

System Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me (the Windows 95 family)
• Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP (the Windows NT family)
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
• Unix
  • X Windows version 11 revision 4 or up
  • XTEST extension
    (use “xdpyinfo | grep XTEST” to check for XTEST)

All systems must support TCP/IP networking.

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