Drag your mouse between Linux, Mac and Windows screens [synergy2.sourceforge.net]
Traditionally you have two solutions to your keyboard and mouse problems:
- Use an expensive KVM switch (I guess in this case it's really a KM switch...) and remember to switch back and forth
- Have three keyboards and mice (or two and strain your back reaching for the laptop)
Synergy is an opensource project that lets you drag your mouse across all three (or more)! Yay! Your keyboard enters into whichever system currently has the mouse on it's screen (And yes, there is a solution to the ever present Ctrl-Alt-Del problem - just hit Ctrl-Alt-Pause - except since my Happy Hacking keyboard has no pause key I'll have to patch the code...)
Even better - as you move around, the clipboard follows you :)
At last - some software that does what you want. I'll report back when I have it up and running at two sites. (This one will be fun, because all three are on differen subnets with firewalls...)
Update: The current 1.19 release is a bit smoother it seems, and the clipboard copying to MacOS X clients also appears more reliable.
The scroll wheel support for the Mac client is still way too slow.
I hacked COSXScreen::fakeMouseWheel in lib/platform/COSXScreen.cpp to speed it up. Just before the call to CGPostScrollWheelEvent, I added the line wheelIncr *= 5; and that seems about right.
02:59 AM, 16 Jun 2004 by Mark Aufflick Permalink
Progress
Well - it works completely as advertised! One annoying thing for me is that the mac client is beta and the linux server is slightly less production than the windows server. Combine those two and you get jerky mouse movement on the Mac. It's not too bad though. [Time to dig into the first c++ code I have looked at in years!]
by Mark Aufflick on 06/16/04
Hold the McNagle...
There are multiple causes to the jerkiness, but one of them is the Nagle algorithm implemented in the linux tcp stack and used by ssh. The Nagle algorithm basically says that if you try to transmit a really small amount of data, hang onto it for a few microseconds to wait and see if more data is sent, which for normal things is the optimal thing to do. The synergy2 source turns Nagle off on it's socket, but if you're tunnelling over ssh, ssh turns it on in the tunnel. The simplest solution is to run ssh with '-X'. As well as setting up the X tunnel (which you can ignore if you want), it also requests the lowest latency options, including turning off our friend the Nagle algorithm. See this thread in the Synergy2 forums: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1083816&forum_id=199580
by Mark Aufflick on 06/23/04