Share keyboard and mouse between OS X and XP


(It’s more fun when you’re two. Photo by me.)

While I love my Macbook there are still a few programs I need Windows XP to run, especially when you’re doing MIDP development as I happen to be doing at the moment.

So, I had to dust of my old PC and put it beneath my rather small desk. The problem then is that I don’t have room for two keyboards. What to do?

Synergy to the rescue!

Synergy is a program that lets you share mouse and keyboard between two computers using the network. It works really nice, even with simple copy-paste between the OSs.

The installation is not quite as straight forward as one might like so here’s a video showing how to set it up.

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3 Comments

  1. Posted September 11, 2008 at 9:01 pm | Permalink

    Dual screens + Vmware Fusion?..

  2. Erik Starck
    Posted September 11, 2008 at 9:14 pm | Permalink

    I run VirtualBox which works OK, but 1) it eats memory and 2) it consumes a lot of CPU cycles and makes my MacBook fan spin like crazy.

    There are also some possible issues with connecting phones over USB and so forth. Things are just easier one a “real” PC.

    Maybe Vmware is better.

  3. Posted September 12, 2008 at 12:57 pm | Permalink

    Yes, vmware works quite well with USB connections, and do not eat as much CPU.

    Running VMWare right now to scan documents in Windows, USB to MacBook Pro and Windows in VMWare sees it just as it was directly connected to a hardware USB port (crappy HP have not updated support for Leopard for my scanner, last HP product for me perhaps…)

    Nicolai

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