Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Maybe you all know this already, but let me share my excitement anyway!

I was getting tired of juggling with mice & keyboard as I was jumping from one machine to the other one, both being hooked up to the same monitor. Inevitably, I'll pick the wrong screen/kb+mouse combination and start typing, extremely frustrating... I started lurking on ebay for KVM switches, but decided to give Teleffect a shot first (free download at http://www.sgi.com/products/evaluation/ )...

Basically, Teleffect is a client/server (master/slave for Teleffect, must be from Alabama or Missisipi ) software acting like a KVM. An IRIX machine is the server, IRIX and/or Windows machines being slaves.

In my case, I have an Octane2 and a PC next to each other in a tight corner of my office. By simply dragging the cursor towards the far side of the screen, the cursor simply passes onto the next screen, allowing now to drive the PC with the sgi's mouse and keyboard. On the PC, going the opposite direction with the cursor brings me back on the sgi's screen... That is absolutelly cool! No need for a KVM switch!

It's not restricted to 2 machines and works on Win XP even though it says it's for NT4.0, so practically, the number of kb+mouse is at least divided by two, potentially more!!

I know it's been around for 5-6 years, but I never bothered to try it... Well, now it's permanently on!

.hmmm
i've seen it under irix.. but not between irix and win
..good to know..

i've a dumb question

i've a sgi 18.1" tft monitor with dual imput
would be great to connect two sgi's to it
and set teleffect
so with the imput button on the monitor and only one kybo and mouse
i can fully use two machines

theorically can be do that?

rob

to radrob: that's how I used to do it (switch on monitor, teleffect for kb & mouse). You just scroll the mouse off the choosen edge of the screen and it grabs control of the other machine's desktop.

Teleffect worked great on NT4, but was abit erratic under Win2000. That's when I switched to x2vnc (from Neko) which essentially does the same thing.

You can go one step further under Win2000 server, Win Xp and Win 2003 server and that is rdesktop (from Neko again!). Rdesktop let's you open the PC's desktop in an X window on your IRIX machine using a remote protocol built into Windows. Before OpenOffice, I used to use this method alot to translate documents non-IRIX folks sent to me using a Windows laptop.

An alternate to rdesktop (and slower) that supports Win NT and Win 2000 (non-server) is TightVNC from freeware.sgi.com. In fact, TightVNC (or just plain VNC) will work between any two computers (Mac, Win, *nix).

Lastly, there is also x2x (freeware) that shared kb & mouse between IRIX and another Unix/Linux machine.

This is exactly what I've been looking for. I was going to buy a KVM switch tommorow but maybe I'll give this a try instead.

btw. I take it, it just runs under windows and IRIX, i.e no Linux support?

Use x2x (freeware) for IRIX to Linux.

Use x2vnc for Linux to Windows.