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Windows Solution - check out win2vnc
Authored by: crobertson on Feb 18, '04 08:29:09PM
I'm doing just that right now! It took me ages to find a solution, but the one I stumbled across is doing the trick. I had anonymously submitted my setup as a hint a month or two ago, but it never showed up on the boards. Anyway, here's my original post:
I have a Windows 2000 desktop computer and an iBook at home, and for the longest time I was trying to find a cross-platform solution to share my mouse and keyboard between the computers. I didn't want to use a KVM switch because I want to be able to instantly switch computers. But I only want to use one keyboard and mouse!

I first became aware of software for Windows called Desktop Rover by Neslo Software. I started searching for Mac software, and found the open source project iROS. Despite its rough edges, it's brilliant in that it uses Rendezvous to discover other Macs and establish the connection. Unfortunately, the Mac version doesn't currently work with the Windows version.

I finally found my solution in a piece of software called Win2VNC for Windows. It sets up a VNC link to another computer, but doesn't open a window on the Windows PC. Instead, the mouse pointer simply moves over to the Mac's screen. Of course, on the Mac side one needs to be running a VNC server. The Share My Desktop application does a great job. Just make sure that the firewall has the correct ports open. I believe ports 5800 and 5900 both must be open if you are sharing as screen 0.

So the process to start sharing is straightforward:

  1. Start up Share My Desktop
  2. Click on the 'Start Sharing' button
  3. Run Win2VNC on the PC, typing in the IP address of the Mac and the password
  4. Voila! You are connected. Change the connection options on Win2VNC to 'Swap mouse buttons 2 and 3' and set the Direction to suit your setup.

The solution is not ideal, but it does let me have my CRT monitor display my Windows desktop and my iBook LCD show the Mac desktop while using a single mouse and keyboard. The copy and paste mechanism only works for me when I copy text in Windows and paste on the Mac. Win2VNC also seems to get confused in multi-monitor situations. In that case I set the direction to be 'North' off of the primary monitor and it works reasonably well.



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