Synergy

This story goes back to 2001 when I was doing some web development work. I had Apache/Perl/MySQL on my desktop PC for developing the programs but I also needed to run Macromedia Fireworks to do the graphics. According to Larry, one of the principle values of a programmer is Laziness, so after rebooting for the second time I decided there had to be a better way.

I looked at running Fireworks in Wine, which didn't work. I ran fireworks in VMWare, but that was slow and I didn't particulatly want to pay a licence. I can't remember what I ended up doing, but it couldn't have been that good

Skip ahead to Dec 2002. It was Christmas day, just after lunch when everyone goes to sleep. I hit the web and discover Synergy. Synergy allows me to use one mouse and keyboard to control two computers. Wait a minute! How's that different from a KVM? The key is that each machine has its own monitor and so the sharing is done is software (across the network) rather than hardware. So, I slide the mouse off the edge of my Debian system, and it appears on the next monitor running ... wait for it .... Windows. Yep, that's right it's cross platform as well! Even better the clipboard is shared between the monitors.

Kudos to all the Synergy developers!

Windu running Windows (left), Quigon running Gnome (right)