Over the past year and a half I’ve had to relocate my office more times than Milton Waddams, so I’ve become accustomed to traveling light. Each move, however, has required me to adapt to a new desktop arrangement since the office furniture isn’t standard between buildings (or certain locations within them). In the most recent move this past week, I lost about a third of my desktop space and quickly realized I had to modify my cramped arrangement somehow.

Work provides me with a desktop computer, but I prefer to do all of my development work on my laptop which I carry back and forth between work and home. At work, I “dock” the laptop by plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse and connecting an additional monitor for a dual-head setup. So, all together I had two monitors, a laptop, two keyboards and two mice/micepads, a coffee mug, a water cup and a useless phone…but no space for note taking. (Yeah, I still use pen and paper!) Bottom line, I needed to eliminate some clutter on my desktop and the obvious choice was to eliminate a mouse/keyboard pairing.

While typing on the laptop keyboard and navigating around with the touchpad are tolerable for short periods of work, I need an external mouse and keyboard in order to work on my laptop all day. So how do I share a single mouse and keyboard between two computers, each with its own display(s)? Fortunately, a coworker had mentioned Synergy earlier this year and I figured I’d give it a shot. I’m using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on both machines and a quick check of Synaptic showed that Synergy was available for install, so I installed it on the two computers. After a simple configuration, I’m now using the mouse and keyboard connected to my desktop computer seamlessly with the laptop! Excellent utility!