Synergy or similar apps

[Red Squirrel]

I'm looking at going back to single monitor on my main linux box and using a Raspberry Pi to control the two side monitors running their own OS instances. I typically use the side monitors for light web browsing, monitoring stuff, and opening SSH consoles. I find some programs really don't work well in multi monitor setups and tend to open all over the place and even open dialogs where they don't belong etc... so I think this will help stop that issue by forcing everything on the one monitor considering there will only be the one. It will also allow me to take the video card out of the system and cut down on a couple hundred watts of power usage. I think the video card I have in there is better than the one in my gaming machine too so I can add it in there.

So basically I'm just looking for the best way to have it so I can move the mouse over to the other OS instance and control it with keyboard and mouse. The video will be directly connected. I used Synergy before and it worked ok, except anything semi graphically intensive would cause the cursor to lag a lot, even something simple like a javascript effect on the web.

I might end up just going back to Synergy as it worked ok other than that choppyness bug in certain websites/programs but I never spent much time trying to figure that one out. Just thought I'd check if there's other options I might not know about.

 

[Red Squirrel]

So I finally ended up doing this. I have two Raspberry PI 3's running Raspbian running Synergy for both side monitors and the centre monitor connected to my main workstation which is running the Synergy server and has the keyboard/mouse. So far so good, but it's still early so time will tell if this ends up working out, but I like it so far as each monitor is basically it's own environment and don't have to worry about stuff opening all over the place.

The Raspberry Pi is a bit slow at loading programs, but for terminal sessions and web sessions it's actually very usable. Found an RDP program that works great too for the windows servers I have.

What I'll probably end up doing it setting up the PIs so they are powered by the main machine and set it up so that when I do a shut down on the main machine it sends a shut down signal to the PI's too. Have not decided how I'm going to do that but probably some kind of SSH / key-pair script that gets called.

 

[Paperlantern]

I like this, I don't think I could tolerate the slowness of the Pis but i like the concept. I ran a windows box, i think XP, next to a Mint 7 or 8 machine back in 2010 or 2011. Windows machine dual monitor, and the third monitor was dedicated to Mint. Synergy was also my connector of choice and even 5 or 6 years ago, it was very usable. Felt like a triple monitor set up. Eventually i went to VM and ran it full screen on the third monitor, but when it was bare metal, Synergy did an outstanding job.

I'll be interested to know how you set up the kill signals to the pis, if you figure it out, post back here.