Have multiple keyboards and mice on your desk? With Synergy, you can seamlessly share one keyboard, mouse, and clipboard between multiple systems. Have a laptop to the right of your main display? Just move the cursor off the right edge of the screen and it will appear on the laptop.

we’re going to show you how to share keyboard, mouse, and video (click for short demonstration) between multiple desktop computers, using different Operating Systems with a free Open Source program called Synergy2.

If you have multiple machines in the same workspace, you probably use a KVM to manage them -- or maybe you even have multiple keyboards and mice. There's a better way! Synergy lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple networked machines. It's even cross-platform!

Not to be confuse with the latest boardroom buzz word, synergy is a nice little application that allows the sharing of keyboard and mouse services between up to 4 physical boxes. Synergy lets you use one keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. To do so it requires that all the computers are connected to each other via TCP/IP networking.

Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but one of the keyboard / mouse combos that clutter your desk or that your laptop was easier to control? If so then Synergy is the answer to your woes.

Synergy is an open source project that allows you to share a keyboard and a mouse among several different computers, each connected to some sort of monitor, without any extra hardware (i.e. KVM switches). Synergy runs over the network and can be used with several different operating systems.

Developer Chris Ball has patched the Vino Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server to display multiple simultaneous mouse and keyboard events. The result could be an end to the battle over mouse and keyboard control among local and remote users in a VNC environment.

QuickSynergy is a GUI frontend to the command-line program, Synergy. This little app combo is fantastic -- it allows a user to control multiple computers with a single mouse and keyboard, allowing copy/paste from one computer to the other, and it functions with many different operating systems, including Linux, Mac/BSD, and Windows systems.

One, there are times when keyboard navigation is necessary (ie, lose of mouse functionality) and two, sometimes it's actually faster to navigate with the keyboard than the mouse. Thus knowing your way around the keyboard and how to use it to navigate in Firefox (or Linux really) is important.