I’ve been dual-booted into Windoze for some gaming, and it just wasn’t right without synergy letting me slide over to the Macbook to get some work done while waiting for those wonderful Windows progress bars. It took a little futzing to get synergy working right. Basic steps I took before it worked for me:
- Set a good hostname on the MBP using [sudo scutil –set HostName myhostname], and reboot to keep you honest
- Set up a good hostname for your W7 box
- In fact, make sure you have your network configured properly, including static IP’s and good hostnames for all your machines
- On your router, use MAC addresses with DHCP to assign static IP’s automatically, to really do this right
- Make sure each box has IP/hostnames set up in hosts files ([/etc/hosts] on OSX, [%SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts] on W7)
- Make sure you can ping between the W7 box and MBP box using your nice clean hostnames
- Install synergy on W7, and set up the shortcut to run it as administrator, in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode
- Configure the synergy server on W7 with the MBP and W7 hostnames
- Do NOT autostart synergy when computer starts – Windows 7 apparently doesn’t allow desktop interaction from services? – set it up to run on login
- Start the server manually on W7
- On the MBP, download synergy into the appropriate location (somewhere under /Applications, in my case)
- Start up the synergy client on the MBP as follows (/me <3 screen!) : [screen -S synergy_client -d -m ./synergyc -n mbp_name -f w7_name]
- Once it works, you can convert the synergy client script to [start_synergy.command] so you can double-click it in Finder
- Then, you can put [do shell script “~/scripts/start_synergy.command”] into the AppleScript editor, save it as an “Application”, and drag the app to the dock for quick clicking. Whoop!
It’s not perfect yet, sometimes I have to use [screen -r] to see what’s going on, and occasionally clean up multiple versions if I click the dock icon twice or whatever. But synergy is soooo comfy and nice! :>
