Ever tried compiz' Enhanced Zoom Desktop plugin? You can zoom in and out on your desktop with your mouse wheel and the Win key, and maneuver around and type in the zoomed desktop. Very handy for using my 32" CRT TV attached to my stereo rack computer by S-video from the couch 5 meters away. Or at least it was until changes to xorg made it impossible for me to install the crummy fglrx proprietary ATI driver on my onboard video adapter (which doesn't have 3D radeonhd support). Now I have to sit close or use VNC from my laptop. Hmmm, KDE4 seems to have a magnifier plugin for Desktop Effects that is similar.

I suspect Windows 7 and OSX must have something similar?

I'm not your mother, Vinterman (AFAIK). Can you give me some hint about what you did to retrieve your install? I didn't use the button but did a vi ":%s/jaunty/karmic/g" on sources.list and a 'apt-get dist-upgrade' after commenting out 3rd party repositories. Maybe I should have commented out contrib, universe, multiverse, upgrades & backports as well, The upgrade choked on some packages, a few rounds of removes and purges of various things wouldn't go through, rebooting stopped at mounting the file system. I'm waiting for a mandriva-linux-free-2010.0-i586 torrent to finish before blowing away Ubuntu altogether.

Linux upgrades are a difficult ho to road. Most Ubuntu upgrades have given me a bit of grief, but this is the first time I've totally broken the system. I have one box that I upgraded every 6 months from 5.04 to 8.04 that is still happily running Hardy LTS a lot more crisply than a heavily used 3.5 year old Windows install. Fedora & Mandriva upgrades are even rougher, Debian is better. My systems tend to be bloated & heavily customized, running multiple DEs and lots of non-standard packages, which doesn't help. I just deleted a couple of GB of games I never play to bring my /usr partition below 80% yesterday on the 2.5 year old Debian sid system on which I'm typing. 25 GB, that is a big-ass Linux install.

/dev/sda2 ext3 18G 14G 3.5G 79% /usr
/dev/sda3 ext3 20G 9.9G 8.4G 55% /
/dev/sda6 ext3 297G 55G 227G 20% /home

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr
4096

$ cat /etc/debian_version squeeze/sid
$ uname -a
Linux sid 2.6.31-0.slh.3-sidux-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Sep 16 23:41:49 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

Seems I live another day even with sWINE & virtualbox-ose installed.

you know if Bill Gates had a penny for every original idea he ever had he'd be flat broke.

If you are using stable. The last time I checked (December) there was no simple apt-get/aptitude repository way to set up the proprietary Nvidia driver in testing. That may have changed now that Lenny is getting close to being released as stable. I didn't read TFA, but I'm guessing there are a lot more sid and testing desktop users than stable, which gets dated very quickly.

I hope one of the reasons Sir-cut City went tits-up was their chicken-shit maneuver a couple of years ago firing 3,400 of its more experienced workers to replace them with new hires willing to work for less. Mind you, the folks they canned weren't getting rich there, making on the order of $11-12 an hour after working at CC for 7 years. In the meantime in 2006 the CEO raked in $10 million and the executive VP pulled down almost VP $7 million. Our corporate masters appreciated CC's flinty-eyed approach, the stock went up .35 cents a share that day (3.5 times its current value). Wall Street hates it when workers are paid enough to sleep indoors, "The Street" has been pissed at CostCo for years because they pay $15 an hour.

CC's prices were higher, their sale items were almost never in stock, and the vast majority of the times I shopped there I walked out empty handed. But the thing that ticked me off most as a customer was their "double" mail-in rebate policy. They might hawk a rodent for $10-$15, but you'd have to send in 2 separate rebates, which meant you had to photocopy the UPC for one of the rebates. Folks would forget to go to Kinko's and the MIR postmark period would toll. I'm sure CC had a lower rebate redemption rate than their competitors (and higher total rebate amounts per item), but it still didn't help because it generated so much ill-will. I stopped even glancing at their circulars a long time ago.