Synergy on Fedora 28 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

I was waiting for a few years to upgrade my 16.04LTS and finally when time came I didn’t hesitate. However it created a huge problem! I wasn’t able to sync my mouse and keyboard with synergy (free).

I wondered debugged a lot, first thing I found the synergy version on Fedora was 2.x while that on Ubuntu was 1.8.8. So I downloaded same version of synergy 1.8.8 from my favorite switch mirror.

Yet the problem never got over, I tried to swap the server – client but to no avail. Almost a week got over and I was still haggling with multiple keyboards and mouse combinations. I also read posts about Scroll locks, etc… but that didn’t help either.

But today while browsing on Fedora 28, I found that Mouse movements over Firefox were very laggy (something like dropped frames while painting the mouse), I wondered why. It struck me, these days the default server is wayland server. Lemme try disabling it. Edited /etc/gdm/custom.conf, where I had to just comment-out the line WaylandEnable=false. Ensure the line stays WaylandEnable=false. Edited the Ubuntu config /etc/gdm3/custom.conf (Oh by the way I had installed the vanilla-gnome-desktop package.

Rebooted the systems… and 😎😎😎 Got it working!

Steps to get synergy running

  1. Ensure same version of synergy 1.8.8 on Fedora 28
  2. Disable Wayland on both the systems
  3. Reboot (for goodluck 😀 )

Sample synergy.conf file

section: screens
  ubuntu:
  fedora:
end

section: links
  fedora:
    right = ubuntu
  windows7:
    left = fedora
end

Synergy Command for Server (Fedora in my case)
synergys -n fedora --config /home/rutu/synergy.conf --debug WARNING

Synergy Command for Client (ubuntu in my case)
synergyc --client -d WARNING --name ubuntu 172.16.160.97

Update: I found this Wayland support for Linux client and server #4090

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