Synergy

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Revision as of 22:37, 3 January 2008 by Leftyfb (talk | contribs)
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Taken from a post by cmonkey.

Synergy2 is one of my favorite apps. It looks and feels like magic when you get it working. It allows you to use a keyboard and mouse connected to one computer on another computer (or multiple computers) over a network, even if they have different OSs. It also lets you copy and paste text between the computers, which is oh so convenient (and it makes writing this howto a bit quicker than it would be otherwise).

It was pretty easy to get working between the XO and my laptop running Ubuntu. I'm going to describe how to get it working between the XO and a linux based computer, but its also easy to set up with Windows.

Installation

The first step is to get Synergy installed on the XO and the other computer(s). On the XO:

sudo yum install synergy

Then, you need to edit the xorg.conf file. Open it with nano (or your favorite text editor).

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down to the line that says:

Option  "XTEST" "Disable" # Mostly a debugging tool

and change it to

Option  "XTEST" "Enable" #  Mostly a debugging tool

Save and close the file, and then restart the XO, or restart X with a ctr+alt+erase.

On the other computer: If you're running Ubuntu or Debian

sudo apt-get install synergy

If you're on Windows, OS X, or Fedora, you can download the installer: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=59275&package_id=58013

Configuration You're probably going to want to configure the computer as the synergy server and the XO as a client. To configure the server, use the instructions here: http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/running.html For the name of the XO, just use "olpc".[This did not work for me, I had to use the hostname of the olpc. You can find this by typing "hostname" on the olpc] For reference, here is my ~/.synergy.conf file, where Nemesis is the name of the server computer, and the server is to the right of the XO: Code:

section: screens
	Nemesis:
	olpc:
end
section: links
	Nemesis:
		left = olpc
	olpc:
		right = Nemesis
end


Running it On the server computer, run:

synergys

On the XO, run:

synergyc -n olpc <ip address of the other computer>

And you're done! You can add it to the boot scripts on both if you want.