Remote Control my desktop from my Tablet PC

Here's my assignment to myself yesterday: find a way so that I can control my desktop PC my a Tablet PC. When I say "control", I mean sending mouse and keyboard event from my Tablet to my desktop.

The reason I had that need was because I was ... errr .. lazy. I want to watch video on my bed and I am too lazy to walk off the bed, change video setting, walk back to my bed again, and continue watching. So I told myself: "may be there's some open source software that allows me to remotely send keystroke and mouse movement from my Tablet PC to my desktop. Well, I found it.

The software is called Synergy, and it's basically a virtual KVM. Once the service on the client and server started, you can use the keyboard and mouse of one machine to control another machine.

The concept sounds simply, but when I execute it, it was not as straight forward as I thought I was. But eventually I made it working. Another good thing about synergy is that it's portable friendly. All I need to do is running Synergy.exe from the application folder in all the machiens involved and that's it.

In my setup, during the Synergy session, both my desktop and my tablet PC will share my Tablet PC's keyboard and mouse (Tracepoint of my ThinkPad to be exact). I can temperorily stop the session my using some hotkey.

So now that I establish my premise, let's start setting up:

On my Tablet PC:

• I ran Synergy. I check the radio button "Share this computer's keyboard and mouse (server)".
• Click the [Configure ...] button. And the top part of the window you will see a listbox named "Screens". Click [+] button, to bring up a "Add Screen" dialog, and enter the machine name of my tablet PC. Click [OK] to confirm. Now I have the machine name of the Tablet PC in the listbox, but that's not good enough since you need both the machine name of your laptop and the machine name of your DESKTOP to be on the list too. So do the similar setup sequence for the desktop. You should now have 2 items in the listbox, one for your server machine and one for the machine you want to control.
• Under Options section, click [Advanced..], and in the textbox for Screen Name, enter the machine name of the Tablet PC.
• Under Options section, click [HotKeys ..], and you will see a hotkey set up screen. I will use this screen to set up two hotkeys so that I can switch between control my Tablet using my Tablet keyboard, or control my desktop PC using my Tablet keyboard. To add a key, click [+] at the left column and then press a key. To set up the associated function, click [+] at the right column, select radio button "Switch To Screen", and then select the screen you want to switch to. Remember the two machine name you entered in the first step? This is where those name got pull form. I picked ALT-1 for tablet and ALT-2 for my desktop.

On my Desktop PC:

• check the radio button "Use another computer's shared keyboard and mouse (client)". Enter the machine name of the controller (TAblet PC in our case) machine name.
• Under Options section, click [Advanced..], and in the textbox for Screen Name, enter the machine name of the desktop PC.

OK, now both machine are setup. The final step is to press the START button of each of the Synergy client.

Now when I press ALT-2 on my Tablet, I will start controlling my desktop using both the Tablet and the keyboard. Pressing ALT-1, and I can back to controlling my tablet. Pretty awesome.