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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

It probably means he's using http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ - I've used it for similar things (typing on a Mac laptop, with a second monitor hooked up to a Linux desktop) and it's a brilliant solution.

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He definitely means Synergy -- that's the setup I have at work too. (except 24")

Me too, except with Linux on one and Windows on the other. synergy works fine, although the fact that the last release seems to be from 2006 worries me a bit.

that worried me too - but Im hooked :D the fact I can hook my mac, PC, dev machine and laptop (OSX,Vista,Fedora10,XP) to one KB/Mouse is so great!

> the fact that the last release seems to be from 2006 worries me a bit

Me too, but Synergy finally convinced me that it's possible to build amazingly good software that lasts.

I keep meaning to pick up the synergy source code and improve it a bit. Things I'd like to see:

* Make it peer to peer instead of client/server, keyboard & mouse events from all peers are shared, not just the server's

* Use mDNS (e.g. Bonjour) to auto-detect nearby peers and auto-connect to known ones. Also, use some kind of authentication - you don't want random people on a public wifi to be able to get access to your clipboard because you forgot to quit your synergy client.

Alas, I haven't had the time. Maybe this summer...

I'd be willing to sponsor this.

I'd love to shuffle around my project priorities in return for sponsorship. :) I've emailed you at m@..., my email address is in my HN profile in case it gets filtered or whatever.

Tangent: Is two 30" screens really useable? I imagine you end up with neither being front and center, and it gets uncomfortable.

I'm trying to decide between 2x30" and 30" + 2x20"(in landscape) on either side.

Yep. :)

Ah, thank you.

Yeah, it's my number one favorite application of the last 2 years. Works amazingly well most of the time. I have even gotten it to work for gaming reasonably well.

I find it chokes up on some types of clipboard objects between the pc and mac and then I have to restart the service to get it to behave again. Plain text it usually does alright, but text from the web (unicode maybe?) causes the copy/paste to break

I've found it chokes on unicode - converting it down to Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1). I still love it though - been using it for several years.

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