Synergy 1.3.1 Windowz XP and Ubuntu 7.04

For the last weeks I've been using my laptop with Ubuntu and my office desktop with the corporate windows xp. I was using the Terminal Server Client to work on my desktop but switching between windows was quite boring.

In the past when I used to have windows on boths boxes I run synergy to share the keyboard/mouse but didn't install it yet.

First thing the sudo apt-get install synergy althouth it didn't show any error it didn't show any success either so I remove it.

Next googling around I found the following link with a good explanation on what to do to get started, the link is: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynergyHowto

So the steps are:

a) download Synergy the tar.tz from the Synergy project page http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/. The direct link is:
http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/synergy2/synergy-1.3.1.tar.gz

Untar the file on your home directory.

b) Next install necessary libraries:

sudo apt-get install libxtst-dev
sudo apt-get install build-essential

c) Now configure this but specify the location of the libraries.. if not an error of X cannot be found will appear.

sudo ./configure -x-libraries /usr/lib -x-includes /usr/includes
sudo make install

d) The previous step created synergc (client) and syngers (server) on your home director. The webpage mentioned below ask us to move the mto /user/bin so we do a:

sudo mv /usr/local/bin/synergyc /usr/bin
sudo mv /usr/local/bin/synergys /usr/bin

e) The next step is to configure synergy. The system uses a file called synergy.conf , there is an example on the installation folder at /synergy-1.3.1/examples/synergy.conf.

The configuration is quite easy, I have to say that easier than setting this between to windows boxes. Basically you say which are your 2 boxes and then where is which one respecting the other.

Here you have to use the hostname of your linux box and the name of the windowz box you set up on the windowz client.

So my synergy.conf looks like this:



On the windows machine you set up the ip/hostname (you choose) of your linux box and click on the advance button at the end to set up the name assigned to this machine:



On the advance settings just check the name, if you are having problems just make sure that the name on the below screen is the same as the one on the synergy.conf on your linux box. If they are not the same you will get errors on your client machine.



After this run the server synergys --config synergy.conf from your command line (check previous page you can mv the synergy.conf to your home directory and just run synergy) and start the client, you should be able to use your linux mouse/keyboard on both boxes!!!

Please read the document from the ubuntu documentation mentioned above.

Regards
Richard