Almost two years ago, I published a blog post on using Synergy2 to share a single keyboard/mouse with multiple computers. At the time, I was using Windows XP, OSX 10.5 and SuSE Linux. (http://blog.mvaughn.us/2010/02/26/synergy-mac-windows-linux-get-along/). Scott Lowe also did a recent post on Synergy.
Over the holidays, Santa was nice enough to bring me a new iMac for video editing. However, since I am not totally getting rid of my old XP workstation that was my former video editing platform, this was really pushing my limits on desktop real estate. On days like today, when I am also using my work laptop, the three computers and keyboards were simply too much. Time to setup Synergy2.
However, this time I ran into some real issues with using my iMac as the Synergy server. The mouse was working fine on other desktops, but the keyboard was sending all commands to the iMac, regardless of what screen the mouse was on. I finally ran the Synergy2 server as root and all worked fine. That was not acceptable, I did not want this to run as root. However, that did narrow down the issues and I finally found the answer in this thread on a similar issue (Post #102 – http://code.google.com/p/synergy-plus/issues/detail?id=47).
To save you the time, you need to go into OSX “System Preferences” and select “Universal Access” in the upper right corner:
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Once there, check the box for “Enable access for assistive devices”
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After that, I could run the Synergy2 server as a non-root user and all of the keyboard issues went away. If you are experiencing a similar issue, I hope that this helps.