Use synergy on Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04

Question

I want to share my desktop mouse and keyboard with my laptop using synergy. Until yesterday, both ran Ubuntu 14.04 and synergy 1.4, and everything worked fine.

Yesterday, I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 16.04, and apparently this one ships with synergy 1.6. As a result, it has now become impossible to share my keyboard and mouse, as synergy complains about incompatible versions. However, I have not found a clean way of either downgrading synergy 1.6 on Ubuntu 16.04, or upgrading synergy 1.4 on Ubuntu 14.04.

Is there a clean way to use synergy between Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 16.04 computers? I do not want to upgrade my desktop to Ubuntu 16.04 just yet.

Solution

I run into the same problem this weekend, the solution I found was upgrading Synergy on my Xubuntu 14.04 following this steps.

wget -q -O - http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu trusty-getdeb apps" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install synergy

It actually updated from 1.4 to 1.7.6, and turning off the Encryption option on both "Server"(Xubuntu 14.04 with Synergy 1.7.6) and "Client" (Ubuntu 16.04 with Synergy 1.6.2) I was able to connect and use it again.

The strange part for me was that I didn't remember the option to register the app... I need to check this later again.

Comments

[Rinzwind]

I can confirm this. I have 1.7.6 running on 14.04 and 16.04 but with encryption on. If I remember correctly 14.04 also required an upgrade of SSL.

[leomilrib]

cool! I was not happy leaving this option off. haha Are you running the Synergy 1.7.6 on both machines or just on the 14.04?

[Rinzwind]

14.04 and 16.04 and w10. w10 holds the server file.

[tink]

Thanks man @leomilrib ... been futzing around with this for aaaaages.

[gelonida]

having now the same problem for ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 I don't know why synergy always breaks BW compatibility. It's in my opinion not a helpful choice. I understand that it's not enabled by default, but it should be possible to listen to old protocols either on a client basis or as a global setting