Default screen magnifier?

xzoom

I found a simple solution that is working very well for me. I installed xzoom from the default repositories.

The usage is very simple, and exactly what I wanted:

• start xzoom.
• place the window where it does not disturb you.
• "drag" your mouse cursor from within the window to the spot of the screen you want to magnify.

Additional note: I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 and before discovering xzoom, I tried the approaches suggested in the accepted solution. My experiences:

• In ccsm I failed to find the "Magnifier". Under "Accessibility" I have an "Enhanced Desktop Zoom", but it is not really clear to me how it works, and I don't like to enable a global shortcut for this.
• The Virtual Magnifying Glass is not in the repositories, and the downloaded version does not like my libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (at first it did not find my installed libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so; fixing LD_LIBRARY_PATH turns out that it is not a 64-bit executable...).

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Another alternative I found is gpick, which is also available natively on Ubunutu. It works by showing a zoomed in window in the left area -- and the zoomed area follows the mouse cursor:

Compared to xzoom it seems to lack the possibility to scale and resize the zoom window, but offers the additional feature of picking pixel colors -- which sometimes is a related use case for me.

Unity (until Ubuntu 17.04)

CompizConfig Settings Manager

To use magnifier in Ubuntu, you can do so by using CompizConfig Settings Manager. If you don't have it installed, you can do so from the Ubuntu Software Center.

Or, just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command below.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

You can also use Synaptic Package Manager

Once you invoke the program, look under Accessibility for magnifier, and click on it to configure it.

Or you can try Virtual Magnifying Glass 3.5

With Cinnamon desktop

I'm visually impaired (I have Cone Dystrophy and thus my central vision is gone and I absolutely have to use full screen zooming to use a computer). This was my solution:

First of all, get rid of Unity and install the Cinnamon desktop; it's a much better interface anyway IMNSHO:

Once you have that installed, you can install Tobias Quinn's excellent gnome-shell-mousewheel-zoom.

This will provide Compiz-style mousewheel zooming functionality with Cinnamon.

Another alternative is to use Linux Mint which is an Ubuntu-based distro with Cinnamon built in by default.

If you choose this option, you simply have to add the Tobias Quinn PPA and install the gnome-shell-mousewheel-zoom package.

Canonical has abandoned visually impaired users and their actions are, to say the least, reprehensible and shameful. Every other OS creator provides quality full-screen zooming support for visually impaired users but since the advent of Unity, the actions of the devs of Ubuntu indicate that they no longer care about those users. I'll continue to use Ubuntu-based distros but Unity is now permanently on my "no-fly" list.