Useful Freeware

Share mouse and keyboard on multiple machines with no hardware

Ever wanted to share the same mouse and keyboard on multiple machines?

I have recently needed to link up multiple computers, but didn’t have a KVM handy, so I remembered that a friend told me about Synergy. It is a program that allows you to do exactly that, but you still need a monitor for each machine.

The way it works is you install the program on all of the computers and designate a “server” (the machine the mouse and keyboard are connected to). Then set-up all other machines as clients to share the server’s. You can configure the program to define edges on each computer’s screen, so when you bump the mouse there the control gets transfered to a designated machine.

Here is a summary of the features:

• Share mouse and keyboard and transfer control by bumping at the edge of the screen;
• Multiplatform – you can have the server on windows and share the mouse/keyboard with a mac/linux/etc.;
• Shared clipboard – copy on one, paste on another computer;
• Synchronized screensavers – all start at the same time;
• SSH – you can configure it to use SSH for the connection (sadly on windows requires Cygwin);

Overall pretty cool.

Version Reviewed: 1.3.1

Home Page: Synergy

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.