Once in a while someone creates something that is really cool and useful. This can be said of Synergy…
In their own words Synergy is …
Synergy lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk and it’s Free and Open Source. Just move your mouse off the edge of one computer’s screen on to another. You can even share all your clipboards. All you need is a network connection. Synergy is cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux).
CodingCREW being a huge fan of the open source community always promotes those that take the time to give to the rest of us. Synergy is one of those products that really is useful and it is open source. Being open source, we recommend that you make a donation to the authors to help them with their project.
Currently at one of our work areas we run a Quad monitor setup.
Dell Precision T7400 workstation, 64-bit OS, network connection, running on two bottom 24″ monitors
Dell Precision T5400 workstation, 64-bit OS, network connection, running on upper left 24″ monitor
Dell Precision T3400 workstation, 32-bit OS, network connection, running on upper right 24″ monitor
One Dell Keyboard
One Gearhead 2.4 Ghz Wireless Optical mouse.
We sought a solution to eliminate three keyboards and three mice in the work area and a standard KVM switch appeared that it might do the trick and just not use the video on the KVM switch.
Luckily before we bought a KVM switch someone introduced us to Synergy. The T7400 and T5400 are running 64-Bit OS and the T3400 is running a 32-bit OS. We down loaded the respective packages to each machine and configured them as per Synergy’s documentation. Configuration was so easy you really don’t need documentation but being propeller heads we read the documentation anyway.
Once installed and configured we can now move between screens to change computer using the same mouse and keyboard for all three machines.
This Virtual KM package gets three thumbs up from us – Thank you Synergy