Yesterday, at the GNOME Summit in Boston I did a quick presentation of my new desktop input sharing hotness thingy, called "Mango Lassi" (Alternatively known as "GNOME Input Sharing"). Something like a Synergy done right, or an x2x that doesn't suck.
So, for those who couldn't attend, here's a screenshot, which doesn't really tell how great it is, and which might also be a bit confusing:
And here's a list of random features already available:
- Discover desktops to share mouse and keyboards with automatically via Avahi.
- Fully peer-to-peer. All Mango Lassi instances are both client and server at the same time. Other hosts may enter or leave a running session at any time.
- No need to open X11 up for the network
- You have a 50% chance that for your setup you don't need any configuration at all. In the case of the other 50% you might need to swap the order of your screens manually in a simple dialog, because Mango Lassi didn't guess correctly which screen is left and which screen is right.
- libnotify integration so that it tells you whenever a desktop joins or leaves your session.
- Shows a nice OSD on your screen when your screen's input is currently being redirected to another screen.
- Uses all those nifty GNOME APIs, like D-Bus-over-TCP, Avahi, libnotify, Gtk, ...
- Supports both the X11 clipboard and the selection, supporting all content types, and not just simple text -- i.e. you can copy and paste image data between Gimp on your screens
- Lot's of bugs and useless debug output, since this is basically the work of just three weekends.
- Tray icon
And here's a list of missing features:
- Drag'n'drop between screens. (I figured out how this could work, it's just a matter of actually implementing this, which is probably considerable work, because this would require some UI work, to show a download dialog and suchlike.)
- Integration with Matthias' GTK+ window migration patches, which would allow dragging GTK+ windows between screens. The migration code for GTK+ basically works. It's just a matter of getting them merged in GTK+ proper, and hooking them up properly with Mango Lassi, which probably needs some kind of special support in Metacity so that we get notified when a window drag is happening and the pointer comes near the edges of the screens.
- Encryption, authentication: Best solution would probably be that D-Bus would get native TLS support which we could then make use of.
- Support for legacy operating systems like Windows/MacOS. I personally don't care much about this. However, Zeroconf implementations and D-Bus is available on Windows/MacOS too, and the exposed D-Bus interfaces are not too X11-centric, so this should be doable without too much work.
- UI Love, actually hooking up the desktop order changing buttons, save and restore the order automatically.
- MPX support (this would *rock*)
And finally, here's where you can get it:
git clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/mango-lassi.git/
Oh, and I don't take feature wishlist requests for this project. If you need a feature, implement it yourself. It's Free Software after all! I'd be happy if someone would be willing to work on Mango Lassi in a way that it can become a really good GNOME citizen and maybe even a proper part of it. But personally I'll probably only work on it to a level where it does all I need to work with my Laptop and my Desktop PC on my desk in a sane way. I am almost 100% busy with PulseAudio these days, and thus unable to give Mango Lassi the love it could use. So, stand up now, if you want to take over maintainership!
Hmm, Mango Lassi could use some good artwork, starting with an icon. I am quite sure that someone with better graphic skills then me could easily create a delicious icon perhaps featuring a glass of fresh, juicy Mango Lassi. I'd be very thankful for every icon submission!