I  borrowed a mac to try and play with iPhone development. I already have a linux box (running Ubuntu 9.10). Anyone who has used two computers simultaneously know how annoying it is to have two keyboards/mice plugged. I originally anticipated just using X11 forwarding. However, it is an iMac with a big beautiful screen. It would be an absolute waste to not use it.

I installed synergy on both ends, with the linux one as the server

$ sudo aptitude install synergy

and the mac as the client

http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm/

and it worked.

There was just one very very annoying problem. The Ctrl key and Cmd keys were different. This really messed with my muscle memory. After some hunting around, I just had to update my .synergy.conf file in linux. Here is the relevant section

section: screens
    linux-desktop:
    imac:
    ctrl=alt
    alt=ctrl
    meta=alt
end

et voila. It now works a charm. I  have neglected the configuration of the synergykm and synergys but these can be figured out easily 😉