using synergy

[pgf at laptop.org]

as a follow-on to my "use your XO more" thread, here's a useful
way of sharing your "main" system's keyboard and mouse (including
copy and paste) with your XO, in a fairly natural way.  these
instructions assume a linux desktop machine, but you can do this
with a mac or windows as well.  see http://synergy2.sourceforge.net)
(caveat:  i haven't used this very much, but it sure seems promising.)


   1) on both your desktop, and your XO, install "synergy":
	"yum install synergy" and/or "apt-get install synergy"

   1a) on the XO, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and comment out this
      line in the Extensions session, in order to enable the XTEST
      extension:
         #Option  "XTEST" "Disable" # Mostly a debugging tool
      after doing this, restart X with ctrl-alt-erase.

   2) on _both_ systems, create the following configuration file.
      you can use the following text verbatim in both places --
      the names are placeholders:

	$ cat $HOME/.synergy.conf
	section: screens
	      my_desktop:
	      my_xo:
	end
	section: links
	      my_desktop:
		  right = my_xo
	      my_xo:
		  left = my_desktop
	end

   3) from the XO, create a synergy tunnel from the XO to your
      desktop.  this avoids DNS issues, and avoids needing to
      tinker with your desktop's firewall:

      $ ssh -f -N -L 24800:localhost:24800 <real-name-of-your-desktop>

   4) on the desktop, start the synergy server:

      $ synergys -n my_desktop

   5) on the XO, start the synergy client.  the command connects
      to the server at "localhost", which causes the ssh tunnel
      to be used.

      $ synergyc -n my_xo localhost


now, when you move your desktop machine's mouse off of the right
edge of your screen, control will switch to the XO screen.  i see
latency when using the mouse, but it's not too bad.  (note that
the touchpad or mouse that's local to the XO still functions, so
you can use synergy just to export your keyboard and cut/paste
buffers.)

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org