Sharing monitor,keyboard and mouse between 2 pc's

[Daniel Taylor]

Ninad Bapat wrote:
> Hi
>    I have 2 pcs.I will call them as follows 
> New PC(N) and old PC (O)
> N is a brand new pc with P4.2.4ghz,256mbRAM,40G HDD,D845GVSR mother
> board etc. It is triple booting with XP and FC3 and Ubuntu warty
> O is a old IBM pc PII 500mhz,64mb ram and CD rom drive. I have
> reserved this Pc to load onlu open source software.It is running only
> Ubuntu warty
> I have connected these 2 with a crossover cable.
> However I have only one monitor/keyboard and mouse.
> 
> Is there a way by which I can access the desktop of O and issue
> commands from N with the help of software.i.e I log in to FC3 on N and
> access the Ubuntu desktop of  O and say issue commands run
> applications on O
> 
> I have heard of some tools but do not know whether they will work or
> are suitable for my purpose.foe e.g. Xserver,VNC,nfs
> 
> I do not want to buy any special hardware
> 
> Thanks and regards 
> Ninad
> 

I can highly recommend this, if you ever wanted to go down the kvm route:

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=56&pcount=&Product_Id=134802

but since you wanted to share keyboard and mouse without hardware; i
suggest you use this:

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

( http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/SynergyHowto )

with this however you will have to tell gdm to log a user in
automatically, otherwise you will have to plug a keyboard in to login
each time and run the synergy command (that bit you can automate with
the gnome sessions) and then that all depends on if your motherboard
minds not having a keyboard and mouse plugged in.

if you only want to issue commands however, then look into ssh:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/SSHHowto

it's also worth noting there's a vpn built into gnome/ubuntu, never used
it, so i don't know how it works.


-- daniel