I really hate that two sets of keyboard and mouse occupying too many desk space especially when I am working on spectral assignment or other heavy works. KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) switches (either PS/2 or USB interface) are introduced by my friends, however some of them are not very compatible with Mac/Linux. However, what I am using are one Linux PC and one macbook pro.
But now, I found a very very nice program called synergy. Synergy is a free open source program that performs the KVM switch like function. I did a test by using a WinXP and a MacOSX labtops, it worked very well– I can use the keyboard and mouse on macbook pro to control the winXP-based laptop easily.
However, Synergy for Linux/Unix/Mac users are not easily to handle. There is no GUI for Linux/Unix/Mac users and I found a very nice Mac program called QuickSynergy that provides a simple GUI. QuickSynergy was written by Cocoa/Xcode, so it works well on Apple Macs. For linux users, it seems synergy must be installed prior using QuickSynergy which uses GTK as UI.
