Have you ever had a need to use the same mouse and keyboard with multiple machines? As long as you have a monitor on all the machines there is a great piece of software to help you through your day, Synergy. In my scenario I have my main desktop machine running Win XP, a Mandrake machine and a laptop on my desk. I setup my main machine as the Synergy Server. The Linux machine and the laptop are both setup as clients. On windows the client software runs as a service so as soon as a connection becomes available to the server the client connects and you will be able to use your mouse and keyboard connected to the server to manipulate the client. The software can be setup for North, South, East and West directions so no matter where you have your monitor it will work. The Linux setup requires that you be logged in to X before running the client. As with most software nothing is perfect and sometimes you have to restart the service or the process. I have used another application called Win2VNC but Synergy seems to blow that application away. I have created batch files to automatically restart the software on both the windows and Linux machines. I use this both at home and the office and it is one of the best utilities available. Oh yeah, and it is Open Source. :)