Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Engineering beautiful software jon aquino labs | personal blog

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Using MaxiVista on Linux to give Windows an extra monitor

If your main computer is on Windows but you have another computer running Linux, which you want to use as an extra monitor for Windows, you can do so using a combination of MaxiVista ($40) and Synergy (free).

MaxiVista lets you use another computer as an additional monitor. But it is a Windows program. So you'll need to use Wine to run it on your Linux box.

One issue though is that, when using Remote Control mode (i.e., viewing your Linux desktop instead of your Windows desktop), mouse clicks and the keyboard won’t work. I stumbled upon a workaround though: if you run Synergy at the same time, your mouse clicks and keyboard will work. The catch is that your Synergy screen is “one screen past” your MaxiVista screen, so you’ll need to move your mouse across the screen until it reappears on the other side. At that point, your mouse clicks and keyboard will work on the Linux desktop. A bit annoying, but it’s not that bad.

2 Comments:

  • I'm trying to use MaxiVista between a Windows box and a Linux box. I've run MaxiVistaViewerA.exe using Wine but MaxiVistaServer does not find it. Could you describe how to set it up?

    By Blogger fcampbel, at 5/14/2010 7:23 a.m.  

  • @fcampbel - Regarding MaxiVista on Linux - sorry, it's been a couple of years, so I forget how I set it up. I did have it working for a while though.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/21/2011 8:34 p.m.  

Post a Comment

<< Home