----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Pope" <alan@???>
To: "Hampshire LUG Discussion List" <hampshire@???>
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 11:31 AM
Subject: Re: [Hampshire] What is a Shuttle PC?
> 2009/4/13 Rob Malpass <lug@???>:
>> If only decent screen magnification software were around for Linux, I
>> reckon
>> I could dump M$ completely but I've done a lot of research and those
>> programs that there are e.g. gmag are very buggy
>
> Are these known bugs to the developers?
>
> Are all of the following unusable too?
>
> http://www.magnifiers.org/links/Screen_Magnifiers/UNIX_Linux/
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
>
> --
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> --------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks Al but I visit that link about once a week. I think just about
everything I've picked up on is a known bug. What I need is a dualhead
setup where the secondary monitor effectively becomes a magnified version of
whatever's underneath the pointer. Zoomtext does this just about ok on
Windows but when you're running anything demanding at the same time .e.g. a
30Mb spreadsheet, only Zoomtext seems able to handle it - and even then
things go flaky. Try the equivalent with gmag and Ooo calc and the
secondary monitor often corrupts which slows everything down - and has even
forced a hard reset [yuk].
I've tried what I consider to be the obvious things like reducing resolution
/ colour depth to save on video ram but it is still the case that zoomtext
on windows beats anything I've seen on Linux - not by much - Orca's quite
good for example but the same things still apply.
The thing of course I can't test is whether this is Excel versus Ooo Calc.
I could run Excel inside wine (I guess I cna - never tried it) but I doubt
that would be a fair comparison. Similarly it could be the migration from
the .xls to the .ods file formats - but I can't test this either - the file
sizes are pretty similar (30Mb xls versus 33Mb ooo IIRC)
I'm inclined to think it is resources because the same flakiness crops up
when I'm doing any Java in Netbeans for Uni.
Anyway - thanks all for your help - I don't want this to turn into a M$ v
Linux whinge. I hope y'all know I'm totally pro Linux - it's just in this
one case - I've not found a Linux solution that's as stable as M$ yet.
Though I do concede I've not tried it across the platforms / hardware - I
just don't have the cash!!
Cheers
Rob
