Getting it going ....

When i worked at the other place, we used Synergy. Not the bad and byzantine source-control Synergy, but the software KVM tool.

I have a laptop that's unusable as a laptop, so it is my Windows machine. The screen is busted, so I have it connected to a big screen, and the keyboard is busted, so it's not all that much fun to use. So, I tried the power of Synergy, like I had been using at work.

And I failed.

Talking to Patrick, I figured out the issue. Synergy wants to talk names, not raw IP addresses. I had no local DNS. What few machines needed to talk to each other, I have their 192.168 addresses memorized. But Synergy wanted to work with names.

The solution?

/etc/hosts

Or c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

(There's no legacy BSD code involved with XP. Nope.)

So, I made the wired NIC on the laptop static, named it, and set up Synergy again. And I'm writing on my XP machine via the keyboard on one of my Ubuntu machines' keyboard.

Honestly, I have that keyboard hooked to a KVM switch going between two Ubuntu machines, but that's another story.