Controlling HTPC over laptop

[Tariella]

This is a rather lenghty post to describe my problem.
It is mainly about deciding which of the three softwares: synergy, x2x or vnc is best to use for my intentions.
So please read on.

I have the following setup at home:
HTPC and Laptop, both running gentoo, connected to home network and internet over tcp/ip wlan.
Now since I am lazy I want to control the HTPC from my Laptop while doing the initial configuration. Later the HTPC will run a fully configured xbmc media center software as main user interface and will be controlled using a remote control.

So I want to do the following things:
1) install and configure additional software (using ssh atm)
2) move large amounts of files using x11 and a graphical file manager (using ssh -Y atm)
3) control the xbmc software's settings and start a movie info-scraping process (no way to do this yet)

Since this all are rather time consuming things that can run on their own once started I would want to control them from my laptop, since I don't want to turn on my TV (the HTPC's "monitor") for doing this (or I want to use my TV for something else in the meantime).

My laptop has rather weak performance and is not capable of shader graphics needed for xbmc (so no ssh -Y).

I researched 3 different options of which I believe, that they are capable to help me with my intentions:
synergy, x2x or vnc.

What would be best to do what I want? Or is there something else that would be better?

[Hu]

Synergy is not appropriate here. It would let you use the laptop keyboard and mouse to generate input events on the HTPC X server. Since you want to have the TV busy elsewhere or turned off, you would not be able to see the results of your input to the HTPC X server.

VNC could work, depending on what exactly XBMC needs to show you. Since you say that the laptop cannot handle X-forwarded windows from the HTPC very well, you may have trouble with VNC also. It does not take long to prepare though, so give it a try.

The description for x11-misc/x2x sounds like an X-only version of synergy.

[Tariella]

Thanks for the input. I'll try VNC then.