Mango Lassi: Better than Synergy
About 3 years ago, my friend Lann showed me this sweet, cross platform program called Synergy that lets you share one computer’s mouse and keyboard among multiple computer/screens. Why was this cool? This meant that with my laptop, sitting on my futon I could control my TV computer. Yea, I’m that lazy.
As the years go on, I find myself getting lazier. Now that I have an apartment, the couch is even further away from my TV! So, I went out to set up good ol’ tried and true Synergy so that I can use my laptop to control my Mythbuntu box. But, it didn’t work. Every time I moved my mouse off screen, if showed up back in the center of the original screen.
Now, I don’t care why it doesn’t work. Really, I don’t. I fiddled for about five minutes, and then went to see if there was anything better out there, when I stumbled across Mango Lassi. It was designed specifically to solve the suckitude of Synergy and x2x. Unfortunately, there’s not a package for Ubuntu, so we have to do it the old fashioned way:
(following Marius Gedminas’s instructions)
sudo apt-get install git-core curl build-essential intltool \You get a nice little GUI:
automake1.9 libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libxtst-dev \
libavahi-glib-dev libavahi-client-dev libavahi-ui-dev \
libnotify-dev libglade2-dev
git clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/mango-lassi.git/
cd mango-lassi
./bootstrap.sh
(acknowledge the prompt)
make
sudo make install
I learned the hard way: don’t try launching this remotely over ssh with X forwarding enabled — not good things happen. I’ve got this running on Intrepid Ibex and Hardy Haron, and it works beautifully!
