14 March 2010

Sharing clipboard across computers -> Synergy

After some research, I decided to try synergy.

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/


It took me a while to make it work, but it has VERY NICE debugging/log
interface which helps troubleshooting any problem you may have.

I was worried about if synergy would work well in my environment,
because I have only ONE screen (well, they are two, but connected to
only one computer) and the only thing I wanted synergy for was to
share clipboard.

This is my environment:
- One W2003, I connect to it by RDP
- One Win XP, I connect to it by vmware-view
- Ubuntu, this is the host and is the only real monitor.

----------- This is my synergy.conf
section: screens
view:
ubuntu:
win2003:
end


section: aliases
view:
<view-IP>
ubuntu:
<ubuntu-hostname>
win2003:
<win2003-IP>
end

section: links
view:
left = ubuntu
ubuntu:
right = view
left = win2003
vcb:
right = ubuntu
end
------------------------------------------------

Now I can take the most of "copy on select / paste on middle click"
thanks to x-mouse gizmo (in windows) / native support in Linux.


Synergy also opens the door for scripting actions. Imagine you select
something and want to execute something on the other computer using
that selection as argument.... But for now, clipboard share is what I
need and it does it perfectly.


Issues with my conf:
- I used IPs instead of hostnames as the env is pretty weird on the back.
- For the host-server, I had to use the hostname instead of the IP. On
the logs I saw it was looking for the hostname instead of the IP I
gave to it on the conf file.
- On the clients I modified their names (in synergy conf GUI) to match
my synergy.conf

I hope it helps someone.

All my respects to Synergy creator. Very nice tool.

Too Cool for Internet Explorer