A mid-night thought...
May. 6th, 2012 07:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpIn the middle of the night, I had a fragmented dream in which I replayed my travails with the Ubuntu laptop as I tried to get it to play nicely with the house's router, and at some point, it became apparent to me that I had done pretty much everything but reboot the machine.
So when I got up this morning, I turned the computer on (which sort of defines "cold boot") and... Shazam!... the problem has gone away.
My hypothesis as to what the cause of the problem might have been is now moot, but I suspect that the Firefox proxy settings did something to the system setup that didn't get undone when I reconfigured Firefox to not use a proxy to access the Internet.
Restoration of connectivity enabled me to install and run something called Synergy, which is a utility that lets you control several computers using a single mouse and keyboard. It's like a KVM switch, except it's implemented in software, utilizing a network connection between machines and allowing focus to be shifted from one computer to another simply by moving the mouse from one screen to another. An added benefit is that whatever's on your clipboard makes the move, as well. And the icing on the cake is that the software lets you do this with any combination of machines running Windows, Mac OS X, and/or several flavors of Linux.
So using Synergy is not at all like my netbook's capability to extend a desktop across two monitors. That means I can't drag a Windows window across screen boundaries and deposit it on the Ubuntu laptop (and there is no reason to think you drag a window across a screen boundary from one Windows machine to another). Still, if you have to divide your attention among several machines...
That said, I cannot spend any more time today exploring what I can and cannot do with the software. Work came in last night, and I still have to finish despeckling the item that must be delivered before I hit the rack tonight.
So, I better get to it...
So when I got up this morning, I turned the computer on (which sort of defines "cold boot") and... Shazam!... the problem has gone away.
My hypothesis as to what the cause of the problem might have been is now moot, but I suspect that the Firefox proxy settings did something to the system setup that didn't get undone when I reconfigured Firefox to not use a proxy to access the Internet.
Restoration of connectivity enabled me to install and run something called Synergy, which is a utility that lets you control several computers using a single mouse and keyboard. It's like a KVM switch, except it's implemented in software, utilizing a network connection between machines and allowing focus to be shifted from one computer to another simply by moving the mouse from one screen to another. An added benefit is that whatever's on your clipboard makes the move, as well. And the icing on the cake is that the software lets you do this with any combination of machines running Windows, Mac OS X, and/or several flavors of Linux.
So using Synergy is not at all like my netbook's capability to extend a desktop across two monitors. That means I can't drag a Windows window across screen boundaries and deposit it on the Ubuntu laptop (and there is no reason to think you drag a window across a screen boundary from one Windows machine to another). Still, if you have to divide your attention among several machines...
That said, I cannot spend any more time today exploring what I can and cannot do with the software. Work came in last night, and I still have to finish despeckling the item that must be delivered before I hit the rack tonight.
So, I better get to it...
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-06 07:34 pm (UTC)My only complaint is that the first machine I tried to run it with (going back a few years) was a very underpowered XP desktop I had around for email. Whenever Outlook got more than a few messages the KVM stuttered a bit while the machine buckled under the load.
Fixed that by scrounging a new-er desktop from the support team a few weeks later.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-07 09:42 pm (UTC)I noticed (the hard way) that none of my Autohotkey keyboard shortcuts worked after I started Synergy. When I stopped Synergy, Autohotkey regained its functionality.
Since I use Autohotkey extensively in my day-to-day and haven't really found a use for Synergy, the solution, for now, is going to be dirt simple.
Bye, bye, Synergy!