Toss Your KVM - Synergy And Input Director?

[alaricljs]

Synergy has had its rare issues, back prior to it being dragged back into development.  I've gone a different route for what I used to do with Synergy, but it's been improving at a good pace by all accounts.  Definitely give it a go, I had never heard of Input Director before now and I made a point of looking for alternatives to Synergy.  Just went to the site and now I see why, windows only.  My first major use was a linux laptop to a solaris workstation, second was same linux to my home windows box.

[steeef]

Yeah, Input Director is Windows only. I've used both, but I think I'll stick with ID. I use it at work between my desktop and my laptop, and once everything was set up, it just worked without much tweaking. It's been a while since I've used Synergy though. I think my biggest gripe was that clipboard support was lacking. ID never missed a copy and paste though.

[Soarer]

Err... so where's the modification?!

Disadvantages:

• No 'V'!
• Needs master switched on to control slave.
• Doesn't work until loaded, so no fiddling with the slave's BIOS.

No way could I toss my KVM - four machines (three of them in dual monitor config) into three monitors would be unmanagable otherwise.

I would like a shared clipboard, but that's about it.

[woody]

what's a v?

kvm

[firestorm]

We use Win2VNC here, or at least used to.  Our old security DVR software was a pig, so our guards had two high power workstations.  To make it simpler for one person to operate, and minimize desk clutter, we used Win2VNC to bring the controls of PC #2 over to PC #1.  The clients just have to have a good old VNC client installed.  I knew of Synergy before Win2VNC.  I'm not sure why I opted for Win2VNC besides the familiarity with, and simplicity of, VNC.

There's also X2VNC for the linux folks; have not tried that myself though.

[alaricljs]

Synergy was nearly always seamless for me.  The only times glitches would happen is when the network was down in a strange way for too long and synergy at either end of the link decided to just give up.  This happened more often with 1 wireless against 1 wired box than with everything wired.

[firestorm]

It's been a while since I've used Win2VNC, but I don't recall there being any lag.   The mouse pointer moved seamlessly from screens on one machine to screens on the other.  The only caveat is, the screen with the mouse pointer is the one that the keyboard controls.  You can't seamlessly Alt+Tab between apps on both machines for instance.  I know what lag you're talking about, and I couldn't say for certain that it doesn't exist.  I don't think it does though, as the lag is generally related to bringing over the video to the remote (i.e. commanding) machine.  In this case, the video doesn't fit into the equation.

[Mazora]

+1
I had been using Synergy for a year or so and one day a coworker came at my desk and started to laugh when he saw Synergy installed. He said "Input Director" and left. I googled, figured, installed and from this time I've been enjoying ID. Its really good (windows here).

Yeah, Input Director is Windows only. I've used both, but I think I'll stick with ID. I use it at work between my desktop and my laptop, and once everything was set up, it just worked without much tweaking. It's been a while since I've used Synergy though. I think my biggest gripe was that clipboard support was lacking. ID never missed a copy and paste though.

[kps]

I use synergy at work with a Linux host (for real work) and a Windows client (for corporate email and such). It generally works fine, though with the current version the server process occasionally quits for no apparent reason. One nice feature is that it can translate modifier keys, so that I can have Super act as a duplicate Control key on Windows (which lacks a dedicated menu shortcut key).

[8_INCH_FLOPPY]

Hell no. Nothing can replace my 4-way kvm switch. Hardware FTW.