Presentation Remotes for OpenOffice Impress?

saintlupus asks: "I'm going to be teaching an introductory Computer Science class in the fall, and I'm using OpenOffice Impress on my Debian Powerbook for a lot of the lecture material. Does anyone know of a brand of wireless remote that works with this presentation software? I'd rather not be locked behind the podium while I'm teaching, so the idea of a remote is appealing, but nobody lists Linux compatibility for these things."

Comments

Wireless mouse

[Omega1045]

If nothing else, you might be able to just use a wireless mouse. Isn't left click the next slide button? Can't remember... And with a mouse you can navigate if needed. Don't know if Bluetooth will go that far. A boss of mine had a wireless trackball that worked clear across the room, before the days of bluetooth. It was really cool, you held it like a gun and worked the track ball with your thumb and mouse click with the trigger finger. That might work too.

Re:Forget the remote

[saintlupus]

So this is a meaningless Ask Slashdot; just go grab whatever wireless pointing/clicking device you feel like and have at it

I thought the same thing, until I borrowed a rather pricy Interlink remote control from another office and it didn't work at all with Impress. The problem was that it showed up to the OS as a USB Keyboard rather than a pointing device, and pushing the "next" button just sent a keystroke to the machine rather than the mouse click event.

This stuff is made to work with Powerpoint -- understandable, since they're the 800 lb gorilla in this space. That's why I chose to Ask Slashdot, because I figured that I couldn't possibly be the only person who has wanted to use Impress in a classroom.

--saint