Linux: how to "zoom" into a screen area à la Mac OS X?

Question

It seems to me on Mac OS X it is possible to "zoom" (like a photocamera does) into a region of the screen.

It is handy for example to put at full monitor size a video which would otherwise be limited to be just into a small window (ie. embedded in a web page and not watchable standalone.), obviously losing some quality due to the "zoom".

Do you know of any tool or way to do the same thing on a Linux desktop (with Gnome as desktop manager if it is desktop manager dependent).

Solution 1

On a reasonably updated gnome desktop (e.g. Ubuntu 9.04 or 8.10):

• Right click on the desktop background and select 'Change desktop background'
• click on 'visual effects' and select 'Normal'
• make sure that the 'compizconfig-settings-manager' package is installed in your system (this is in Ubuntu... in another distributions, it may have a similar name)
• go to system-preferences-CompizConfig
• select the Zoom effect, activate it and look at its configuration (usually Super-mouse wheel is the default key to activate it).

Solution 2

When stuck on a machine without fancy Compiz effects one can fall back to the good old xzoom tool, its not as pretty as a real fullscreen zoom, but gets the job done most of the time.

Comments

[Nathaniel]

I think one can also use Super+1 and Super+2 or something like that. That's going from memory, you should probably look at the keyboard shortcut in Compiz Config.

[indi]

It would be great to have a keybinding for xzoom such that you can apply it on the current window. It is difficult to have a custom part of the current window zoomed by it because of the window gui.

[Vano]

You'll have to make sure Compiz is your WindowManager