April 5, 2005
Windows World No Longer
I have had the luxury of getting to focus my development efforts at work for about 5 years on a single platform: Windows. It is our server platform and that is where I spend the majority of my time. However, at the beginning of the year I started on a new project that involves moving our technology to a new server platform — Linux. Its been a while. I last used Linux on my desktop in college back when you had to or you weren’t cool. These were the days of Windows 95 and NT 4.0.
So over the last month I have been working on a development platform strategy for our product team. We are building the products on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS. After lots of planning, I thought I would post a picture of what I stare at all day since if you check the webcam you only see the backside.
On the left is my IBM ThinkPad running Windows XP. This is mostly used for “corporate” work and e-mail. On the right is a HP XW4200 workstation running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Because I am so sick of using a KVM after all these years, I decided I had to go multi-monitor. Its the only way.
For the quick switching of keyboard and mouse, I have Synergy installed. If your not familiar, this tool (and other like it) basically allow you to move your mouse from screen to screen by just moving the mouse off the screen in the direction of the other screen. Behind the scenes, your mouse moves and keyboard presses are transmitted over the network and feed to the other PC.
A common problem with a setup like this is that you have all these keyboards laying around for each computer but you only use the set on the master computer. However, Synergy only works after you are logged in and can’t be activated to help with boot-up issues, etc. So what I did was I still connected all the computers to a USB-based IOGEAR KVM switch. I don’t really use the video switching but the keyboard and mouse switching comes in handy when I need it.
So that is the setup. Seems easy but it seems like it took forever to figure out the ideal setup that I can live with for a while.
