Synergy let you share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers. In the following example, thewall is going to have our server and laptopnew is going to be our second computer. thewall, is to the right of laptopnew. thewall is also our linux box running Linux Mint (gnome). laptopnew is running Windows 7 x64.

First thing we need to do is install Synergy on our two machines. On the linux box run:

sudo aptitude install synergy

Next we need to install Synergy on our second computer. The version of Synergy in the Ubuntu repos is version 1.3 so we need to install that version. Click here for the download list.

Once you have it installed on both machines we need to create our configuration file. The following is an example of my configuration file.

gedit ~/.synergy

Configuration file:

section: screens
thewall:
laptopnew:
end

section: aliases
laptopnew:
192.168.1.24
end

section: links
thewall:
left = laptopnew
laptopnew:
right = thewall
end

section: options
screenSaverSync = false

end

For this to work correctly you must use the hostnames of both machines. Now we can open a terminal and run:

synergys

This will start the server; next we want to hit the start button on the client. You should now be able to move your mouse between the two computers! Synergy also allows you to copy and paste (text only) between the machines.

To get the synergy server to run on startup we can just add it to the gnome startup. Menu -> Preferences -> Start Up Applications.

The next time you reboot Synergy should start automatically. That concludes this tutorial, if you have any questions or comments please leave them below.