Updated: 21-Oct-2023
The proprietary Synergy (https://symless.com/synergy) and the free, Open Source version, Barrier (https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/releases) are magical, cross-platform applications that allow you to use the keyboard and mouse from one of your computers, to control and interact with the desktops of other computers on the same Ethernet or WiFi network. You can even copy and paste clipboard contents between them.
Our article updates Matt Cutts' 2007 blog post described "How to configure Synergy in six steps." (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-configure-synergy-in-six-steps) It provides information and illustrates setting up the application on two Linux computers, using it's integrated graphical setup. Although our instructions show the setup for just two Linux computers, with the current releases of Barrier and Synergy 1, you can setup and control up to 14 client computers running a mix of Linux, Windows and macOS operating systems -- all from a single server computer.
The current release for Barrier is 2.4.0 and for Synergy 1 it is 1.14.6. As you might expect for two applications with same origins, the setup is identical for both Synergy 1 and Barrier 2 so we'll show only the Barrier screens in the instructions below. The current release for Synergy is 3.0.75.7-rc3 and is designed to detect all computers with Synergy 3 install as long as they are on the same network. It also automatically establishes an initial configuration for you. You can adjust the configuration graphically to reflect your actual setup. This is my configuration. All five computers use the same keyboard and mouse connected to the XPS-13 laptop! For each of the 5 computers I have ensured that Synergy starts up automatically when the computer reboots.
With the software's graphical, drag and drop setup, you can be controlling multiple Linux, Windows, and macOS computers in seconds. In our example, the keyboard and mouse are connected directly to a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu MATE, so we will be using them to control both this Linux computer, and an older HP G60 computer, also running Ubuntu MATE. The controlling computer is considered by Barrier to be the "server" but we don't need to worry about that terminology, since the setup doesn't require that you know that at all. Here are the steps:
In the beginning (late 1996) there was CosmoSynergy, created by Richard Lee and Adam Feder at Cosmo Software, Inc. Then the project moved to a new phase and became Synergy from a CosmoSynergy contributor Chris Schoeneman. Later, to make initial configuration easier, graphical setup utilities were developed such as QSynergy (https://sourceforge.net/projects/qsynergy/) and QuickSynergy (https://sourceforge.net/projects/quicksynergy/). With the release of Synergy 1.4.2 came a merging of three projects, QSynergy, Synergy+ (https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy-plus/) and Free Synergy (https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy-stable-builds/) itself. In 2011, Nick Bolton founded Symless and took the product into paid, proprietary format. The free Open Source Barrier was forked from Symless's last open source version, Synergy 1.9. In May of 2023, The Symless team discontinued Synergy 2 and released Synergy 3 (release candidate) with many cool new features, including the graphical configuration screen.
You can listen to our podcast episode 130 for an interview with one of the Synergy project owners, Nick Bolton, on the release of Synergy 1.4.2 for Linux.
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Going Linux Podcast by Larry Bushey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.