Windows Stuff

barrier is a soft kvm that lets you share your keyboard and mouse between multiple systems who have their own monitors. It is interoperable with Windows, Linux and Mac. If you have a bunch of machines under your desk it makes life easier to not have to shuffle through different keyboards. This is a fork of synergy.

It works surprisingly well, even cutting and pasting between the different systems.

I run the server on windows (the device that owns the keyboard and mouse) and a client on FreeBSD. Since the windows box gets shutdown most nights I do have to give things a bit of nudge now and then when I first start up the windows box.

Up until recently I had dual 24“, 1080p monitors on the windows box and single monitor on the bsd box sitting on top mid-way between them. I acquired a new 27”, 1440p monitor for windows. This caused me a bit of a conundrum. Before the switch I could move the mouse of the top of either windows monitor and it would go to the bsd monitor. Coming off the bsd monitor, the mouse would go to the left or right windows monitor depending on the side of the bsd monitor I came off.

That no longer worked - I had to cross from the 1440p monitor to the bsd monitor. Going from BSD to windows it would only return to the 1440p monitor. That was new. Lots of searching and I could see people had munch more complicated arrangements than I had which were working fine for the most part.

Accidentally I found that this was in fact a windows issue.

When I put the monitor in I had the configuration in windows, under the display settings configured thusly

Changing it slightly to

and there we go. That was all it took to get things working the way the should.

cygwin provides a Linux like environment for Windows. Most familiar tools are available. It provides for an ssh server as well X Windows emulation. It essentially provides a compatibility layer. It's not full blown linux.

Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 is a Linux environment running in a light weight VM. I've not used it but from what I've read I believe Cygwin has a more integrated feel. That may change. I suspect I would be more likely to continue using something like VirtualBox than WSL.

• ssh-pageant: Very handy cygwin ssh-agent replacement that allows us to leverage Puttys' pageant. This saves us from entering keys for both windows and cygwin. You can install it from the cygwin install process.
• Start X-windows/New terminal

winscp is a handy file transfer utility.

I use it quite a bit, sometime for file transfer but mostly to edit remote files.

• Command line invocation with a jump host

Get all of the details regarding installed memory including configured and actual speed.