Synergy is quite simply a marvelous app. As the site explains,
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between
multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its
own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users
with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its
own monitor(s).The thing is, it is so simple, yet very useful for me. I use it
at work when I have my laptop and my computer on the desk.
Setting up my desktop as the server and the laptop as the client, it means that I can use my use my desktop mouse and keyboard on the laptop simply by moving the mouse pointer off the left hand edge of my desktop monitor onto my laptop screen. This is surprisingly useful, more so than I can describe here.
Other features that are particularly neat are that it works on different operating systems and between them (Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X). I must admit that I have only tried it between two Macs, but it works very well even though the OS X version is the least developed. Additionally, you can copy text from one computer, move onto the screen of another and paste the text. Handy. Apparently you can also copy and paste with files and images on the Windows and Linux versions but this is not currently possible with OS X. Finally, it is a opensource program, what more could you want.
No special privileges are required, so I simply run
synergys on my desktop, create a ssh tunnel forwarding the relevant port and then run
synergyc on the client. This is all without becoming a root user.
Monkey dust!