The Love Shack

I’ve spent quite a bit of time struggling with getting Synergy to work to my satisfaction in OSX. (Leopard, 10.5.3 to be exact)

Problem number 1. Running as a daemon doesn’t work. It crashes after a few seconds and OSX prompts you to report the error to Apple. So you have to run it as a foreground process using the -f flag. The problem with this is that you have to keep a terminal handy. So I decided to run it in a screen session so that I could keep it running when I’m not around. Unfortunately, if you start it in a screen session (or via ssh for that matter), the clipboard sharing stops working. I don’t know why, but it does. (If you do know why, please comment and let me know!)

So after quite a bit of struggling, and trying a dozen different solutions, I finally found one that works. Start it in the foreground in the background. That is, start synergys or synergyc with the -f switch, but then put an & (ampersand) after the command to automatically background the task. At this point, you can close the terminal and leave synergy running in the “background”. Of course, YMMV. While this has been working fine for me, if you’ve got a better solution, I’m all ears.

For those who can’t make heads or tails of the preceding paragraph and just want the damned thing to work, start synergyc using:
synergyc -f your.computer.name &
and start synergys using:
synergys -f &
That should get you up and running with full clipboard support.

Note that in my case I was connecting two OSX desktops together. Different combinations of OS’s may yield different results, but I get the feeling that regardless of what OS the other computer is running you’ll still have the same problem on the local OSX machine.