htrefil / rkvm

Virtual KVM switch for Linux machines
MIT License
386 stars 50 forks source link
keyboard kvm linux linux-desktop mouse remote-management

rkvm

rkvm

rkvm is a tool for sharing keyboard and mouse across multiple Linux machines. It is based on a client/server architecture, where server is the machine controlling mouse and keyboard and relays events (mouse move, key presses, ...) to clients.

Switching between different clients is done by a configurable keyboard shortcut.

Features

Requirements

Manual installation

If you can, it is strongly recommended to use the AUR package to install rkvm.
Note that the master branch can contain untested and breaking changes - for regular use, it is recommended to pick the latest release instead.

$ cargo build --release
# cp target/release/rkvm-client /usr/bin/
# cp target/release/rkvm-server /usr/bin/
# cp target/release/rkvm-certificate-gen /usr/bin/ # Optional
# cp systemd/rkvm-client.service /usr/lib/systemd/system/
# cp systemd/rkvm-server.service /usr/lib/systemd/system/

Configuration

After installation:

Why rkvm and not Barrier/Synergy?

The author of this program had a lot of problems with said programs, namely his keyboard layout (Czech) not being supported properly, which stems from the fact that the programs send characters which it then attempts to translate back into keycodes. rkvm takes a different approach to solving this problem and doesn't assume anything about your keyboard layout -- it sends raw keycodes only.

Additionally, rkvm doesn't even know or care about X, Wayland or any display server that might be in use, because it uses the uinput API with libevdev to read and generate input events.

Regardless, if you want a working and stable solution for crossplatform keyboard and mouse sharing, you should probably use either of the above mentioned programs for the time being.

Limitations

Project structure

Bincode is used for encoding of messages on the network and Tokio as an asynchronous runtime.

Contributions

All contributions, that includes both PRs and issues, are very welcome.

Donations

If you find rkvm useful, you can donate to the original author and maintainer using Ko-fi.

License

MIT