What Barrier can do for you.

[Member Robin]

barrier is:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install barrier

Checked (installation and program functionallity) on antiX 22 full and antiX 23 full.
antiX 23 (32bit and 64bit): 2.4.0+dfsg-3
antiX 22 (32bit and 64bit): 2.3.3+dfsg-1.1 (or 2.4.0+dfsg-3~bpo11+1 from the backports repo)
antiX 19 (32bit and 64bit): 2.1.2+dfsg-1 (or 2.3.3+dfsg-1.1~bpo10+1 from the backports repo)
antiX 17 (only from backports repo: 2.1.2+dfsg-1~bpo9+1 )

What does Barrier?
It’s a seamless flow software, or to put it differently in one word: It’s a virtual KM-Switch. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch)
It will virtually connect the keyboard and mouse from your master PC to one or more slave PC’s, so you can seamlessly work on them simply by moving the mouse beyond the screen edges. Each PC uses its own display. The keyboard will follow the mouse, if you key in something it will go to the program running on the PC on whose display the mouse is recently. Also you can use clipboard to easily copy content between programs running on the different PCs. It replaces in antiX the functionallity provided by proprietary tools like e.g. logitech flow (from the options suite not available for linux).

When installed, start Barrier from antiX Main Menu → Accesoirs.

Select your language:

Server (master):

Select “Server”

Open Change Settings from Barrier menu.

Change Screen Name to something different than antix1
(This is necessary only if the second PC you want to connect also runs antiX live or has for some other reason the same host name.) Each device you plan to connect needs to get assigned its individual screen name.

Click OK. Back in Barrier main window Click on Configure Server.

Drag the monitor icon from right upper corner to one of the fields next to the existing screen.
Double click the new unnamed icon and change the screen name to whatever you plan to use for the client. In the example I’ll use »Notebook«.

Click OK to accept the configuration.
Back in Barrier main window select from Barrier Menu “Quit“. (Don’t use the X from window border, it will only close the main window, while barrier itself still stays running in the taskbar)

Now open a terminal window, e.g. Roxterm.
Enter the two commands:

$ cd ~/.local/share/barrier/SSL
$ openssl req -new -x509 -sha256 -days 999 -nodes -out Barrier.pem -keyout Barrier.pem

(see: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/1694#issuecomment-1158967053 )

Follow the interactive path on console through certificate generation:

After your personal certificate was created successfully, you can close the terminal window.
Start Barrier again from antiX Main Menu → Accessoirs.

This time it will show you the fingerprint of your freshly created certificate. (click the arrow right of the ellipsised fingerprint to see it in full length.)

Now you are ready to start the server. Simply click the Start button.
It should come up with an info dialog “Barrier is now connected. You can close the config window and Barrier will remain connected in the background.” In the main Config window the lower left corner changes to the reading “Barrier is running“.
Close all barrier windows. In your system tray you should see the barrier icon. Right click on it will bring up a useful context menu where you can manage the service.

Btw, your config will get stored in two separate places in your home folder:

~/.config/Debauchee/Barrier.conf
~/.local/share/barrier (and its subfolders)

Client (slave):

Now set up the client (or even more of them)
On the slave notebook do mostly everything exactly the same as on the servers side, but instead of selecting “Server” now select “Client” from the first Barrier window.

Click on “Finish”
From Barriers main window select Change Settings or key in F4 exactly as you’ve done on the server side before.
Change the screen name to what you have preset in your server configuration as new screen name for the slave. (Notebook in my example)
Close the config window and quit Barrier.
Restart Barrier from antiX main menu. You should see the changed screen name now.

You can start the client now, but in case it doesn’t connect with automatic setting, click Stop and check the log (right click on Barrier taskbar icon)
If the most recent entries read:
[2023-03-18T18:29:39] NOTE: connecting to ”: :::24800
[2023-03-18T18:29:39] INFO: OpenSSL 1.1.1n 15 Mar 2022
[2023-03-18T18:29:39] WARNING: failed to connect to server: Connection refused

You need to change it to manual Server IP configuration by clearing the checkbox “Auto config” and entering the IP your server has. The proper IP is NOT the one shown in the very Barrier window section “server” above in the client, but the one you can find in the Barrier Main window running on the master PC.

Click on “Connect” You’ll be presented with a dialog asking you to compare the certificate fingerprint with the one you have seen on your server side within barrier main window (compare letter by letter).

Only if the fingerprint matches, click “Yes” to proceed.

Barrier should come up now with an info dialog, reading “Barrier is now connected…” and you should see in Barrier main window left lower corner the status “Barrier is running.”
Close all barrier windows, it will stay in System Tray for management just like on the server side.

How it works

Now can check:

Use the mouse connected to the server, move it beyond the left screen edge. It should move magicaly to the notebook screen immediately, as if it was a single screen. Try opening a leafpad document on the client. When the mouse from master PC is moved to the client, you can write from the master’s keyboard. It works mostly the same as you might be used from virtualbox guest OS windows.
You can even copy text (or whatever) to clipboard and paste it to a window on the other PC. This makes working with an additional notebook temporarily connected to your desktop PC really fast and easy.

How to stop connection?
You can stop the connection by selecting “Quit” from Barriers System Tray icon context menu on client and server.

What is not working?
Drag and drop between the two screens refuses to work. Copy & Paste from one PC to the other: While plain text works fine in all programs, other clipboard content might fail. File copy in file manager from one PC to the other via clipboard doesn’t work either. What works is: Libreoffice formatted text, and Libreoffice Draw drawing elements copied from Libreoffice running on one PC to Libreoffice running on the other one. Not Working is e.G. graphics content exported by mtPaint to system clipboard. It won’t import to mtPaint from system clipboard on the other PC. Also you can’t copy note content from e.g. musescore to a musescore sheet opened on the other PC. Please check yourself and and report what’s working and what’s not.

Further reading:
https://github.com/debauchee/barrier-wiki/blob/master/Command-Line.md

What makes this program extremely flexible is: You can even run it across OS borders. It doesn’t count whether your second device is an Appple or your third device runs on Windows. Just install the respective Barrier version on it and connect them all together.

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[Author]

Posts