How to make a linux desktop and mac notebook share keyboard/mouse?

Question

I explored synergy and installed the server and installed synergykm on mac. but my mac synergykm always fails to connect to the linux synergy server. Any pointers/workarounds/other tool recommendations?

The error that I am getting is this

WARNING: failed to connect to server: Connection refused, but I can ping both hosts.

Answer 1

You're on the right track with Synergy. The trick is to determine why it can't connect. Can you post any error messages or logs from synergy? Perhaps a wireshark trace of the connection attempt.

Also, what distribution of Linux are you running? Do you have a firewall enabled on either system?

Answer 2

sorry to hear you're encountering problems with Synergy; i use it daily (though in the reverse configuration from you; my Mac is the server).

please try the following troubleshooting steps:

1. if you paste your /etc/synergy.conf here, someone may be able to identify a syntax error if any is present.
2. stop synergys on the Linux box (use ps aux | grep synergys to make sure you don't have more than one instance of the server running).
3. run synergys -f on the Linux box and verify that there are no problematic error messages, and that the process stays running.

4. once you are sure the server is running on the Linux box, run telnet localhost 24800. a successful connection looks like this:

   [user@host ~]$ telnet localhost 24800
   Trying 127.0.0.1...
   Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
   Escape character is '^]'.
   
   
   Synergy
   

5. once you have verified that the server is accepting connections, from your Mac run telnet <Linux box> 24800. you should see output similar to what you saw when you ran the command in the previous step.
6. if you've made it this far, you know that your Synergy server is working correctly; now test the client. if you have Fink installed, you can run fink install synergy to install the server and the client on your Mac.
7. from your Mac, run synergyc -f <Linux box> (make sure your server is still running before trying this command!). alternately, open the SynergyKM control panel, set the log level to Debug2, start Synergy, and select "Open Log File". if you were able to complete all the steps before this one successfully, and this one fails, please post the output of that command to aid in troubleshooting; if you couldn't make it this far, please make note of where you ran into trouble and what error message you saw.

-steve

Answer 3

Synergy

One of the best apps ever.

Answer 4

If you don't have any luck with Synergy on your Mac (it states there are some limitations with OSX), I can recommend x2vnc highly.

Probably a bit more of a hassle to set up, and depends on having a single "master" machine running X, but it works, and it works well.

Answer 5

What happens if you stop using synergykm and just use synergyc from the command line?

For example, on my mac, I open a terminal and type:

synergyc -f servername

and it works great. The one big limitation is that I have to use the -f option, if I try to put synergy in the background, it just terminates without doing anything.

Answer 6

I use synergy every day to connect between my Linux machine and my MacBook Pro laptop.

• Run synergys on the Linux box.
• Run synergyc on the Mac machine.

Works like a dream.

Answer 7

Had the same problem.

On Linux I needed to add the Mac's hostname (without the .local for Snow Leopard user's) and IP to the /etc/hosts (This path might change based on your OS) file so I could ping the Mac from my Linux box.