Last weekend, Alan was tellling me about a program he was using called Multiplicity. It's a commercial product for Windows computers, which lets the user share one keyboard and mouse with multiple computers. I understand that it does much more than this, but that's the kernel. He mentioned that there was also an open source tool which duplicates this basic functionality, called Synergy. I'd meant to look and see if either supported Mac OS X, but forgot about it.
Then recently I was reading Engadget, a geeks gadget weblog, and what did they have, but a tutorial on using Synergy on Macs. So tonight I downloaded Synergy, and after a few false starts, got it working with my iLamp and my iBook. I can now sweep my mouse cursor off the right edge of my iLamp's desktop, and it shows up on the left edge of my iBook's desktop. Then I am able to type things on my laptop using my desktop keyboard. It's pretty cool.
The documentation seems to indicate that this functionality is platform independent, using the network and a client-server communications model to let one computer be the server and the other the slave, so I'm gonna try compiling Synergy for my Solaris box at work and see if I can't use my work keyboard and mouse with my laptop. There are times when I want to use my laptop at work, such as when I need to read Windows .doc files, and this would make things so much simpler!
More evidence of my geekishness. Stay tuned...
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