Chaining multiple desktops together with Synergy / Kartik

Head down tail up at the moment. We're racing to get changes in for a milestone in the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. I'm working on the installation documentation for x86, IBM POWER, and IBM S/390.

At the moment I'm using two laptops and an LCD flatscreen to give myself a three monitor desktop using Synergy.

Synergy is a program that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse across two machines, as well as providing a shared clip board. By mounting my home directory on my second laptop using NFS I can work on the same files in multiple windows.

Two of the screens are running on one CPU, the other laptop screen is running on it's own CPU, but the mouse goes between all three, and the keyboard goes to whichever one has the mouse focus. I can cut and paste between all three.

It was simple to download ("yum install synergy" for Fedora users), and set up.

Here's my synergy.conf file. The IP addresses for ibook.G4 and thinkpad.T43 are in my /etc/hosts file.

  GNU nano 1.3.12                       File: /home/jwulf/synergy.conf                                                     

 section: screens
       ibook.G4:
       thinkpad.T43:
    end
    section: links
       ibook.G4:
           right = thinkpad.T43
       thinkpad.T43:
           left = ibook.G4
    end

Aside from that, this morning I went to Kate Pell's lead practice at West End Yoga. Good to be back, and there was a lot of Simon Borg-Olivier influence in the practice today. More about that when I have some time to write about it.

It's also Kartik month, which means Damodara dipa-dana, or offering lamps to Damodara each morning and evening, and Kartik-vrata or special austerities. It's a nectar time. Prahlad and I are having a great time. Prahlad blows the conch each morning while the members of our household are offering the lamps and we sing the Damodarastaka. I guess it must be for him like Christmas season was for me when I was a child, except that it lasts one month.