I’ll start off with a bit of history before I dive into my review of synergy. Last summer I bought a PowerBook G4, while I like my Mac I can’t stand using the touchpad and it wasn’t practical to hook up a mouse to it. What I wanted was to place the Mac on my desk and use my PCs keyboard, mouse and monitor. Well of course the easy answer was to get a KVM switch, well thats where the easy part stopped. I was searching online for a good 4-port USB KVM that was not too expensive, this is harder then you think. Most of the KVMs I found were well over $300 (Canadian) and didn’t have many reviews or much information about them. I came close to buying one off of tigerdirect until I read a review about it and found out it had trouble when pressing more then one keyboard button at a time, well needless to say I was not impressed I like my video games too much. So I put the KVM on hold but that meant the Mac started to be neglected, it wasn’t collection dust or anything but it wasn’t being used as much as it should.

One boring Saturday evening I flipped by G4/TechTV (in Canada) and saw Call For Help TV was on, so I started watching the episode. Darren Kitchen was on from hak5, he was giving a demonstration on an open source program called Synergy. Well it got my attention right away when I saw a Mac, Windows PC and linux laptop all sitting on the counter. I wondered what the program did… Was it a IM client for all systems? Was it a new email client? What was it??? Well I won’t make you wait any longer, synergy was a program to share your keyboard & mouse of one computer with up to 4 more systems over your network, so no extra wires. Best part its Free!

First thing I thought of was using my Mac with my windows PCs keyboard and mouse, so I listened to Darren explain to Leo what the program was all about, I have to say I was impressed. This software has been around for a while now, 2003 I believe, this was the first I heard of it and I am glad I did. I ended up waking up early Sunday morning like a kid on christmas that just HAD to play with his new toy. That’s just what I did I fired up the powerbook and downloaded the program onto both machines.

The windows install is super easy just run the installer. Once you launch the server you need to tell it where the other computers are in relation to the server (windows PC). You just need to do this on the server side.

The mac was a bit different its a command line (terminal) utility, but wait someone else made a graphical interface, OS X Synergy GUI. All you need to do is unpack the synergy files & the GUI files, then launch the GUI and enter the path to your synergy client, specify the IP address of the synergy server (my windows PC) and hit “Start”.

I got the 2 computers up and running fairly easy, then I decided well maybe its time to put my old IBM thinkpad, from my college days, to good use instead of sitting on the shelf. So I downloaded centos and installed it on the laptop. No small feat with the old age of this laptop, its a 1.3 GHZ celeron with 256MB of ram and it showed its age. The install was slow but installed perfectly no need to tweak or find any drivers. Synergy was easy on centos, untarred the files and installed it. You do have to run it through the teminal, use [linux]$ synergyc -f 192.168.0.100 (of course sub in your servers IP) and thats it.

Synergy allows you to copy and paste between all the system so this is great for testing a web site in multiple OS and browsers, this is what I use the setup the most for. If you move the mouse into one of the systems and hit “Scroll Lock” it locks the keyboard and mouse into that system so if you are playing a game you can turn and not end up on another system.

The only problem I have come across is that since installing this on the mac it seems the wireless connection drops out and I have to “turn Airport off” and back on. It doesn’t happen often and its a quick fix.

There you have it, synergy is one of the most useful open source programs I have come across. Hopefully, you will find it as useful as I do.

My current “Super Geek” setup.

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