<TLDR>Get the script here.</TLDR>

(This is mostly for Linux users -- Mac users look elsewhere.)

So, I finally got around to playing with x2x. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it allows you to control a remote machine with a local machine's input devices (mouse, keyboard). Some of you are saying "Aha! That's what they invented VNC for!" x2x is different -- it doesn't actually display what's on the other screen, but rather treats the remote monitor / TV like another attached display.

It is great for our controlling our home HTPC when it's running Google Music, RDIO, XMBC, etc. while I'm working on my laptop. I can just scroll over to the right and I'm controlling the TV, which is miles better than a crappy remote or ridiculously slow VNC refreshes when playing 1080p video.

Anyway, after browsing a blog post that wrote a couple of bash script wrappers, I thought, "Hey, Python can do that, maybe a bit better."

So, here's my github gist for the mouseporter script that starts an x2x session. You'll need Python 2.6+, x2x on both the remote machine and local machine, and faith in code downloaded from the intarwebz. :)

All you have to do (on Ubuntu, anyway) is:

Here's an embedded version of the Gist for copying / pasting.