I was considering getting a KVM the other day, but stumbled across an open source application named Synergy.
It's a pretty nifty little app that lets you share a keyboard and mouse across two or more machines. This means that I can have my laptop sitting next to my desktop monitor and use the keyboard and mouse hooked up to my desktop to control the laptop.
The setup experience is the only hitch to this application. It's not totally user friendly, but it's not that hard to figure out.
Firstly, chose which machine will be the server and run the application on it. Choose the option "Share this computer's mouse and keyboard (server)" and click Configure.
Then, setup a screen for the server and the client machines by clicking the + button under the Screens list. This will give you a screen where you can type the names of the machines and modify the behaviour of the switch. It's probably best to leave the behaviour as standard at first and modify this later if required.
Now you should have (at least) two machine names in the screens list, it's time to setup the switching behaviour. Under the Links list, there are a couple of text boxes and drop downs. The easiest way to tackle these is to picture where your laptop screen is in relation to your desktop screen. My laptop is on the left of my desktop so I just selected "left" from the first drop down, then my desktop name, then my laptop name and pressed the + button. This means that when my mouse pointer goes over to the left edge of the desktop screen it will become my laptop's pointer.
I also need to setup the behaviour for how to go back to the desktop screen, so I just selected the opposite of what I had before.
Now I press OK to close the configuration screen and press start to start the server. If you haven't set it up properly you will get a crazy error message, so just close Synergy and start again. If you're running Vista (and/or a good firewall) you should be prompted that Synergy is trying to do something funny, so just let it. If you're running a firewall and you're not prompted, go to the firewall settings and make sure that Synergy is allowed to communicate.
Lastly, I need to connect my laptop to the server. I did this by opening Synergy on my laptop, which is a client machine, choosing the "Use another computer's shared keyboard and mouse (client)", and entering the name of my desktop (server) PC.
Now when I press start (and cross my fingers) the client connects to the server and I can freely use my two computers with the same keyboard and mouse while Synergy runs with an icon in the system tray.
That's it! It's simple was you get through the slightly cryptic UI, and it really works quite well.
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