Extend a laptops Keyboard and Mouse to other Computers/Displays

I've recently set myself up with a trading system that consists of 2 large displays and 2 laptops and their displays.
I am using both laptops. The first laptop is used mainly to display trading charts, and to develop and upgrade my indicator to NinjaTrader 7. I don't do real trades with NinjaTrader 7, as it is still Beta software.
The second laptop, is used to display trading charts, and to do real trading, using the stable version of NinjaTrader 6.5.
The problem is that it can be very confusing to move between 2 mice and 2 laptop keyboards. So , I Googled for a way of extending a computers laptop and keyboard over to another computer. Essentially, VNC without the display.

The solution that I found was a project called Synergy-Plus. This code allows you to set up your main interface-computer (the one that you sit in front of most of the time), as the server, and another computer as a client. Once, the software is set up, when your mouse hits the left of right edge of you monitor, the mouse and keyboard control jumps over to the other computer and allows you to control its mouse, keyboard and windows.
Synergy-Plus is has really reduced the confusion in the area by allowing me to control both laptops through a single laptop's mouse and keyboard.

Synergy-Plus supports various Operating Systems including Windows, Linux and MAC.
I am currently using it with windows 7 64-bit with no problems so far.

Solaris: Cron Jobs Don't Run (!bad user) locked account

It took a bit of time to find out that my cron jobs where not running for a given user on a Solaris box.

Looking at /var/cron/log I was seeing "!bad user" (userName).

But, the user was fine, I was using it, I'd already su'ed to become the user several times.

Turns out that the problem is that, cron does not like users that have been locked out due to not changing the password. I never saw a request to change the password because I always su to become the user rather than logging in as that user.

So, to fix the problem, run "passwd -u userName" as root or via sudo. After that, the cronjobs run fine.

Apparently, the fact that on Solaris, cron does not run the jobs of a locked user, is not documented in any visible manner.

The Acer Aspire Revo R3610 as a Linux Server.

For many years I have been building Linux servers for my own web and mail services.
I've always limited by hardware costs to $500 or less by reusing old equipment.
Over the last several months, I have had hard drive failures on 3 of my servers, two of which I could live without. Last week, when the third system (my mail server) started to experience failures, I started looking for a replacement server.

I started to look at the PogoPlug as a possible solution. My new PogoPlug had just recently arrived in the mail, and it seemed like a good candidate as a mail server replacement. With is ultra small footprint and its low power consumption, I started hacking it with grand designs in mind. Unfortunately, after getting to the point of being able to install OpenPogo packages to a USB drive, I became cautious about making too many changes to the PogoPlugs sofware. Partly, due to the fact that I have come to enjoy what PogoPlug does best, making data on a hard drive that you have at home, available on the web for yourself and others (if you choose), in a safe a secure manner. Thus, I dropped any further major tweeking for now, until I can see a cleaner safer way of adding additional Linux services to the PogoPlug via OpenPogo, without compromising it's security or bricking it.

I took a trip to Fry's hoping to find a solution via a Shuttle X2700 mini-pc server. I only wanted to spend about $400 at most on the new server, but found that I would be at about $600 after buying the bare bones system, then adding the CPU memory and hard drive. So I lost interest in that route and looked at what they offered in terms of complete systems. Here, I came across the Acer Revo. It's an affordable mini-pc system that uses the ATOM processor, the R3610 is a 64bit processor with 2 cores. Linux actually reports 4 cores because each core can run 2 threads. I bought the R3610 for $329 plus tax. This gets me all I need for a server plus more.

The Acer Aspire Revo R3610 came with Windows 7. But I want Linux to be the main OS.
When I initially tried to boot the Ubuntu installer from a USB drive. I was disappointed to see the message "No Operating system found". I reformatted to USB drive to NTFS and used some procedures that I found on the net to make the USB drive bootable via an original Windows Vista bootable Install CD, but that did not work either as I got messages like "Bootmngr was not found." or "OS was not found.". The simple solution was just a few steps.

1. Download the iso for Ubuntu Server or Ubuntu Desktop.
   
2. Cleanly format a USB drive as FAT32.
3. Use the "Universal Netboot Installer" to place a bootable install of 64 bit Ubuntu Linux on the USB Drive. Just point the unetbootin utility to the Ubuntu iso and the USB drive letter of the newly formatted FAT32 USB drive.
4. Plug the USB drive into the Acer Revo.
5. Set the Acer Revo to boot from the USB drive.
6. Partition about half of the 160Gig drive to run Linux, and leave the other half for Windows 7.
7. Install Ubuntu...
   

Ultimately, I'd like to be able to run Windows 7 VM os to Linux via Xen.

But, I'll have to leave that experiment for later...

Acer Aspire Revo Specs:

AR3610-U9012Genuine Windows^® 7 Home Premium , Intel® Atom™ Processor N330 (1MB L2 cache, 1.60GHz, 533MHz FSB), 2GB (1/1) DDR2 800 SDRAM, 160GB SATA hard drive, multi-in-one card reader, NVIDIA® ION™ graphics, gigabit LAN, 802.11b/g/Draft-N WLAN