Re: Full screen magnifier: howto?

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Enzo asked about full screen magnification:

> What I need to setup a fullscreen magnifier with gnopenicus? Can someone help me?
> I have a debian Sid: the sid version of gnopernicus is able to do this?
> Or I have to get the cvs version and compile it?
>  
Some debian folks will have to answer the Debian-specific questions.  
You'll get best results with a new gnome-mag (CVS HEAD or gnome-2.6 
branch in the past two weeks), because some related bugs have been 
fixed.  With gnome-mag and gnopernicus from HEAD, you shouldn't have to 
do anything special, as long as you have two X screens up and running.  
They don't even have to be on the same host, although performance is 
pretty bad if you are running the magnifier across the network.

(If you don't want to manually work around the recently-fixed bugs, and 
want to use a newer version, skip down to "ALL VERSIONS" below).

If you have an older version of gnome-mag, you'll want to start 
gnome-mag with the "--source-display" and "--target-display" options 
before you start gnopernicus, and you might need to configure 
gnopernicus to set these variables also, and then restart the whole 
thing again, before it works seamlessly.  Another option is to edit the 
".server" file in the directory where your bonobo-activation files are 
stored (look for GNOME_Magnifier.server, it's probably in a subdirectory 
like /usr/lib/bonobo), and pass the "source" and "target" parameters in 
to the magnifier there (you could remove the "-v" for vertical 
splitscreen mode too).  These manual hacks are only necessary for older 
versions, cvs HEAD should work without them.

ALL VERSIONS
From there, the gnopernicus use interface allows you to configure 
magnification to use different source and target screens and sizes; the 
source display is of course the one that your gnome-session writes to, 
and the target display should be the one connected to the monitor on 
which you want to view the magnified result.

It doesn't matter what graphics card or cards you have _as long as you 
have two X screens_.  On some systems this means two graphics cards, but 
it has been reported that some modern graphics cards can easily support 
two x displays if you configure them correctly.  I'm afraid the details 
of "configuring a multi-head system" are out of scope for this list, I 
suggest you ask around, google, etc.

There is also a thing called a "dummy driver" which reportedly allows a 
"virtual" screen for the XFree86 server; if you can get that working, 
you can avoid the need for two "physical" X screens.  The dummy driver 
support is in the early stages, but if you get it configured right I 
think a lot of folks would benefit on  notes about how to set it up.

best regards,

- Bill


> What kind of graphic card if necessary to make it work?
>
> Thanks much for the support.
>
> Enzo
>
>
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