Sharing an Apple Keyboard and Mouse between Leopard and Ubuntu
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008A couple of weeks ago I ran into a problem with my home computer set-up: How do I use the same mouse and keyboard for two computers running different operating systems?
I am running a PC with Ubuntu 7.10 and a MacBook Pro (MBP) with Leopard and I want to use the same wireless keyboard and mouse on both systems simultaneously. I’ve seen this done before but with a slightly different configuration than I wanted.
Normally, one would jump right to Synergy for the solution to this issue; however, I wanted to use my Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse on my PC so the Ubuntu computer could be the server for Synergy. This was the first issue: How do I connect an Apple bluetooth device to my Ubuntu-Linux machine? Without this hack you can see the bluetooth device but you can’t pair with it.
To solve this issue I found a nice post on Joe’s Project Blog. Joe’s post walked me through configuring my PC’s bluetooth dongle to pair with my Apple equipment. Joe’s post only talks about connecting a keyboard, but I used the exact same steps to connect my mouse. So, problem one is taken care of. I am now able to use my Apple bluetooth mouse and keyboard on my Ubuntu-Linux PC.
The second part of this was to install QuickSynergy on both Operating Systems. I was able to do this without too much trouble. I was able to configure my PC as the server and my MBP as the client. However, QuickSynergy doesn’t appear to play nicely with Leopard. Every time I tried to start the peripherals sharing via QuickSynergy I would get an error stating that the application quit unexpectedly. This seems to be a pretty familiar problem in the forums and there seems to be a fix for the issue that you can implement.
However, I skipped the additional hack and went with another Synergy GUI product on the MBP with Leopard. SynergyKM worked right out of the box for me.
The result is one that allows me to share an Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse between my MacBook Pro running Leopard and my PC running Ubuntu 7.10 - where the PC is the server and the Mac is the client within Synergy.