Wednesday 2021-06-02
Nristen's (g)log - Synergy -> Barrier
I have been a long time user of Synergy which is like a software KVM which allows one to use the same keyboard and mouse on multiple computers. It is nice only having one keyboard and mouse on my desk which I can use on all of the computer monitors without having to flip a switch to move the keyboard and mouse to another computer.
All I have to do is move the mouse to the edge of one monitor and it jumps over to the adjacent monitor even if it is on a different computer. I can also copy and past text between the computers as well.
Recently, I added another desktop whose monitor, I rotated 90 degrees so it was mounted vertically between 4 other screens connected to my two laptops that I have on my desk.
I installed Alpine Linux on the desktop so I could play with it and learn more about it. I really like how little resources it uses and fast it boots up.
After installing, however, I found that Symless the company who produces Synergy did not have a version that worked with Alpine Linux and since their product was no longer open source they did not have source code I could compile. I emailed their support and was surprised that they got back to me within an hour confirming that they didn't have a version that would work with Alpine Linux and did not have any plans to release such a version.
I was disappointed especially after paying for the license several years earlier.
On a whim I looked for alternatives to Synergy and found Barrier which was forked from Synergy when it was open source code.
Checking, I found that Barrier was available in Alpine Linux's edge testing repos. I quickly uncommented the edge repos in the /etc/apk/repository file, updated the cache and proceeded to upgrade to the edge version of Alpine Linux. I tried to install barrier:
but could not find the package - then I found that barrier was not in either the main or community repos but the testing so I enabled that one as well. I was on a mission.
Well after that update the system crashed and I found that I could no longer start dwm or i3 window managers. I checked the log file and found that it was no longer finding the graphics driver so I reinstalled without success. I even tried uninstalling all of the packages installed for Xorg, dwm and i3 but none of them worked.
I installed weechat to ask on the irc channel: #alpine-linux but it was getting late so I decided to check the next day.
The next day, I decided that it would be easy enough just to reinstall Alpine from scratch since I had not started using it yet.
While installing, it dawned on my to just download the barrier source code on Alpine and use the compiled version. Once I got through installing the dependencies, it compiled successfully and now works like a charm on all three systems!
Reference Links:
Alpine Linux https://alpinelinux.org/
Barrier https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
Synergy https://symless.com/synergy