At work I have a PC for all my horrible SharePoint work and a Mac for everything else. Having separate keyboards and mice was taking up way too much space.
I’ve installed Synergy to solve the problem. It allows me to share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, without special hardware over the LAN. Its really not that secure so only use on a trusted networks. In fact I need to come back to this look at the data being transferred using wireshark. For more info read this.
The set up is straightforward I set my mac up as a server and my pc as a client. The only gotcha was that the pc client couldn’t see my mac by its name and I used the IP.
All the instructions are here:- http://synergy-foss.org/pm/projects/synergy/wiki/Setup
Setup the server
Download the http://synergy-foss.org/pm/projects/synergy/tabs/download
Install the Mac client. I installed mine into /software/synergy
Create a configuration file.
Sample below. You only need to change the alias section at the end.
# sample synergy configuration file
#
# comments begin with the # character and continue to the end of
# line. comments may appear anywhere the syntax permits.
# +-------+ +--------+ +---------+
# |Laptop | |Desktop1| |iMac |
# | | | | | |
# +-------+ +--------+ +---------+
section: screens
# three hosts named: Laptop, Desktop1, and iMac
# These are the nice names of the hosts to make it easy to write the config file
# The aliases section below contain the "actual" names of the hosts (their hostnames)
Laptop:
Desktop1:
iMac:
end
section: links
# iMac is to the right of Desktop1
# Laptop is to the left of Desktop1
Desktop1:
right = iMac
left = Laptop
# Desktop1 is to the right of Laptop
Laptop:
right = Desktop1
# Desktop1 is to the left of iMac
iMac:
left = Desktop1
end
section: aliases
# The "real" name of iMac is John-Smiths-iMac-3.local. If we wanted we could remove this alias and instead use John-Smiths-iMac-3.local everywhere iMac is above. Hopefully it should be easy to see why using an alias is nicer
iMac:
mymachine.local
Laptop:
My_windows_pc_name
End
Setup the windows client
Download the client from http://synergy-foss.org/pm/projects/synergy/tabs/download
Choose “use another computer’s shared keyboard and mouse (client)”
Enter the ip address of the mac.
Click Test
Hopefully you’re connected.
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