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So synergy does not seem to work to well in Fedora 9 for some reason.  I found a patch that is supposed to correct an issue similar to what I'm seeing so I figured I'd recompile the source and see if it worked any better. 

I started with version 1.3.1 from the official homepage.  No dice, wouldn't get through the "./configure" with the error:

checking for XTestQueryExtension in -lXtst... no
configure: error: You must have the XTest library to build synergy 

I figured that this was simple enough, so I installed the libXtst-devel-1.0.3-3.fc9.i386 RPM and tried again.  Same error.  Seeing as the "official" version of Synergy is a couple years old, I decided to try just rebuilding the Fedora RPM.  Surely that would work...  Downloaded the synergy...f9... RPM.  Same thing, won't get through the configure.  

Back to googling and I found this link that looked like it would solve my compilation problem.  Turns out the Synergy "configure" script doesn't really know how to find the X libraries, so the important bit is to run "configure" like this:

./configure -x-includes /usr/include -x-libraries /usr/lib --prefix=/usr

Seems like it should work but for some reason it still complains about not being able to find the XTest libraries.  So now I dived into the configure script, tore it apart and used the config.log file to see how it was trying to compile its test program for XTest.  Turns out its also trying to include Xext which is what is actually missing.  I installed libXext-devel-1.0.4-1.fc9.i386 and now I can finally run "./configure".  Finally, surely now it will compile.....nope. 

Back to goggle and the Synergy source this time and now the code won't compile because it was written and compiled with some version of the compiler that wasn't so strict when it came to including header files.  Is now I had to go put in a lot of "#include <cstdlib>" and "#include <string.h>" in order allow the latest more particular compiler happy.  I'll be posting a patch of the changes I made soon.  I'm rather perplexed as to how Fedora is releasing source RPMs that don't actually compile on the system they're released for.  I suppose they could have been compiling with an older or different compiler (I used gcc) but it seems unlikely.  

Finally, now I can apply the patch that I mentioned in my last post.  Finally, my mouse won't hang and I'll be back to loving Synergy for how it just works.   Apply patch, run make, fire up synergyc, hey, look at that, works even worse than before...  Well, at least I can hack away at the source now and see if I can fix it myself.  If anyone has seen this and fixed it, I'd love to hear how.

Again, my steps for compiling:

1. get and extract source
2. make sure the Xtest and Xext development RPMs are installed
3. run configure like this:  ./configure -x-includes /usr/include -x-libraries /usr/lib --prefix=/usr
4. run "make"

Time to dig deeper, stay tuned or let me know what I'm doing wrong.