Well, probably all of you that were working on helpdesk as techies had also KVM (keyboard\video\mouse) switch on their desk...
By using KVM, you could easily control multiple PCs with one mouse\keyboard\screen...
Next week I am starting to work on very interesting project for my new company - maintenance framework that should allow small\medium\enterprise companies to easily build maintenance for their services (be it SQL, print servers or citrix servers). I am really looking forward to it - I think it could be huge success and ideas from brainstorming I and my colleague Dennis had on this topics were really exciting :)
Well, and here comes my problem - I came to conclusion that I would need 3 monitors for it ;)
Why 3? Because on 1st I always have Visual Studio open (of course fullscreen), on 2nd I would like to have some documentation (usually Internet or MSDN) and (one I am missing) on 3rd I would like to have small tools like Last.FM player, Live Messenger, Skype etc...
Instead of buying new monitor I decided I will finally try Synergy. Synergy is small utility that allows you to use one mouse\keyboard to control multiple computers and also share clipboard between them. I run into synergy some time ago, I really liked the concept, however I didn't really have use for it that time. I spoke with Lukas about it (btw one day I will make post about people I mention in my posts ;)), because I remembered he used it before. He mentioned that concept was great, however there were some smaller technical difficulties that time.
So I installed it on both my desktop (with 2 monitors) and also my laptop (well, 1 monitor ;)). Installation was very easy - nothing special to configure, installed easily. After installation I configured it - that step is very easy, all you need to specify is that you add potential clients to server (based on client name or aliases) and then specify locations (laptop on left, desktop on right). And that's it - you just run it on both computers and it works like a charm :)
Really nice (and important) feature is that Synergy is available for multiple OSs (OSX, Windows, Linux...).
I am only missing feature to use clipboard to transfer files (only text is shared) and drag&drop (which is very interesting, however I can imagine it must be hard to code it).
