I just set up my laptop at work as a docked second screen next to my main workstation (yeah, I know, procrastination central). I wanted to use the network to control the second machine (laptop) from the nice keyboard of my workstation. I knew I could do it because I use to use x2x when we had the remote HiRes station here (4 old junker PCs with one or two screens each, two keyboard/mice setups).
For some reason I was trying to use synergy, which is completely insecure. The only advice offered on the synergy site about securing it was setting up port forwarding via ssh first, then connecting over those ports. Yuck.
Anyway, since ssh automatically forwards X11 connections, it’s dead easy to use x2x for this task in a secure way (with all the usual nice stuff like ssh key authentication too).
On my wokstation, with my laptop to the right, I run the command
ssh -X laptop "x2x -east -to :0"
That’s it. Run the mouse over to the right hand side of teh workstation screen, it travels over to the laptop screen. Even X middle-click cut-n-paste works. Sweet.
Oh, well, one more cool thing, if you have sshfs installed (and fuse, and have added yourself to the fuse group, and re-logged in, and loaded the fuse module…), you can do this to automatically cross-mount the laptop home directory on your workstation:
#!/bin/sh # Tunnel a x2x connection to a second machine, presumed to be at # the right of this machine's screen. host="$1" mount_dir="$HOME/$host" direction="east" # west means the OTHER screen is to the left echo "Creating $mount_dir" mkdir -p $mount_dir echo "Mounting remote machine at $mount_dir" sshfs cactus: $mount_dir echo "Connecting to remote machine for x2x over ssh" ssh -X $host "x2x -$direction -to :0" # after ctrl-C killing above session, clean up sshfs stuff # sshfs automatically unmounts when you ctrl-C out of above command echo "Removing mount point" rmdir $mount_dir
Thank you to the developers of FUSE, sshfs and x2x… You rock!