Configure and Autostart Synergy

Documentation collected from various sources.

Disclaimer:

Most of this is outdated and probably won't work out of the box with newer Synergy releases. Still, with a bit of tinkering, it may give you clues about what to do to get the job done.

I have successfully run Synergy with auto-start on different combinations of computers running Windows, OS X and several Linux-distros, and still do now, as writing.

Synergy History

The first incarnation of synergy was CosmoSynergy, created by Richard Lee and Adam Feder then at Cosmo Software, Inc., a subsidiary of SGI (nee Silicon Graphics, Inc.), at the end of 1996. They wrote it, and Chris Schoeneman contributed, to solve a problem: most of the engineers in Cosmo Software had both an Irix and a Windows box on their desks and switchboxes were expensive and annoying. CosmoSynergy was a great success but Cosmo Software declined to productize it and the company was later closed.

Synergy is a from-scratch reimplementation of CosmoSynergy. It provides most of the features of the original and adds a few improvements.