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How Do You Share Presentations Under Linux?
Dr_Hajj asks: "I don't like giving presentations. I do my best to avoid having to. Unfortunately, I've been unable to dodge the latest request to give a little talk. This talk is to be presented to folks at several remote locations so there's a need for some sharing technology. How do Linux desktop users out there share presentations with others on the net?"
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
OpenDocument Presentations, maybe?
Dunno.
OpenOffice Impress can do presentations that can be saved as PowerPoint files, and be e-mailed to the other people, or as swf files, and be put on a web page for the other people to see.
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
PDF
I know everyone on Slashdot hates PDF (I don't), but its a dandy presentation format. Acrobat Reader supports fullscreen transisitions and even if you don't like Acrobat - other PDF viewers suffice. Plus it works on most any Unix platform (Adobe natively supports AIX, HPUX, Linux and Mac).
Most of what I do gets converted to PowerPoint format, since most everyone else I know uses Microsoft stuff, but all my stuff is done in OpenOffice.org whatever format I use.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
The best way to make sure your presentation works on every system, is simply making a swf Flash file...and target Flash 7 or less (very important since linux doesnt support flash 8 yet) and embed the .swf file in an HTML file. works great!
For online presentations, I use Ultra VNC's Java viewer. I setup a webpage that automatically detects the remote desktop size and pops up the VNC viewer window properly scaled to fit, works like a charm. All they need is Java installed and the ability to click a single link.
For just plain presentations where the remote people see your desktop and you use the telephone for audio this setup works about as well as GoToMeeting does. If you don't have the ability to host your own conference calls, there are several free conference call companies out there, just search google for "free conference call".
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I still use html very often. It is easy to make, easy to edit even without GUI (make a last minute change). You will be sure it "runs everywhere" and not only on your laptop (from which you forgot the specific power adaptor that day). It is easy to make a copy of your prestentation on CD and hand it over to participants or have it as backup. It is the same format you put it on the web. It might lack some nice gliding, flowing etc from one page to another, but you can extend it with all possible media; flash, sound, ..
> How do Linux desktop users out there share presentations with others on the net?
ed presentation.html
everyone "on the 'net" has a browser. it's pretty easy to write html. every image format you just trhow in.
you wont have flying text tought. but if you need it, don't bother distributing you presentation.
https://jxta-remote-desktop.dev.java.net/ might be useful for you.
This is an open source groupware/colaberation software for your corporate network (*breath out*) . On a serious note; this is a pretty good software suite to help manage shared documents and such. Its compatible with both M$ and Linux. It is owned and developed by Novell and they have released it under an OpenLincense (i believe GPL but don't qoute me just yet.). I have seen this to be very successfull in a wide variety of applications. Try it out. http://www.ifolder.com/
For sharing of presentations, my research group uses either S5 or .pdf for the actual presentations. This gives us either a webpage or a pdf version of OpenOffice / PowerPoint (gasp!). We then share the files via the web and CVS. This tends to work nicely.
We also have experimented with filming our presentations and then uploading them to Google Video or sharing them as a flash movie. This works well for our purposes, but is not optimal for live sharing of video.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
I'm one of the founders of RubyHam, Birmingham, AL's Ruby User's Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rubyham). Anyway, we currently use www.gatherplace.net to host our monthly-ish web meetings where we discuss various bits of the Ruby landscape, provide full-scale code examples, etc. It's Java-based, fwiw.
Pros:
+ Runs almost anywhere for connecting to the presentation
+ Host can transfer control of his computer to anyone
+ Host can make anyone else co-presenter (thus sharing THEIR desktop to all connected)
Cons:
+ Occasionally sluggish, but hey it's a function of my free processor cycles...
+ Linux users may not host the presentation
For something like what you're doing, VNC into a windows box, host the session, connect with the linux box, and make it co-presenter.
Couple this with skype or a dial-in conference line, and you're set.
-knewter
Or using Evince which comes with your Gnome desktop. Also the question seemed to be talking about some sort of streaming over several sites which is kind of silly; the best way to do it is share audio (ekiga (comes with gnome), teamspeak etc) and send out a set of slides. You can do some of the fancy boardroom style things that Windows users have but in reality your IT department will hate you for it and they are just to much hassle for short talks.
I ate your fish.
I think nearly everyone here is missing the point.
At my organization's recent annual meeting, we had several sites on two different continents. PowerPoint (I know, yuck) presentations were shared between locations with GoToMeeting. The presenter moved to the next slide, and all the remote sites updated automatically, in almost real time.
Can *that* be done with Linux?
(The Java JXTA mentioned above is the only response so far that may be an answer.)
1) Evince is for viewing PDFs (which it does well).
2) Beamer is for creating PDFs in a slideshow format (which it does well).
Just thought you should know.
I'll second that. WebEX works for me, and has worked well for years.
PresenterNet looks to be about as cross-platform as they come, aat least from the end user's perspective. Not so much for the initial creation of the presentation. You need to have a presentation initially in Powerpoint format, which then gets converted to Flash during the upload process. Once uploaded, the presenter controls the sequence and speed of the presentation through his/her browser and the end users see a presentation within their browser.
Not free, but fairly cheap at 40 bucks a month for 25 conference attendees/unlimited amount of time.
The The LaTeX Beamer class lets you use LaTeX to create very professional looking PDF presentations. Take a look at some of the examples linked to from their homepage.
I realize that other people have already suggested using PDF but I didn't see any references to Beamer yet. I think Beamer is the best tool for making presentations regardless of platform. I also happen to think that LaTeX is the best tool by far for creating books, articles, and written works in general.
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-- Anais Nin
VNC would be my first choice. Beware that even TightVNC and UltraVNC tend to automatically default to optimal settings for a LAN and not a WAN, so be sure to make all the clients check jpeg compression settings and test in advance. You'd want them to set their desktop resolution to match yours (the scaling sucks). With everything tuned, you'd get pretty good refresh rates, even with some modestly sized movies or animations. Mind that you'll have to find a separate channel to deliver audio.
:P ).
Next you might want to consider H323 conferencing... gnomemeeting, netmeeting, and the like. In addition to voice and webcams, they should give you desktop sharing, text chat, and a whiteboard and crap. (Under Windows XP, netmeeting is hidden but still available via "Run | conf.exe")
If you have a high-end corporate conference room setup (with a Tandberg or Polycom VTC unit) that would make things much simpler in that you could simply plug your laptop into the VGA input. This could also get you better than POTS audio quality (8kHz mono). Very few conference rooms I've seen have bothered to set this up, though. Anyway, since they all speak H323, anyone with gnomemeeting or netmeeting should be able to join and watch and listen (albeit maybe at a lower quality, always test first
http://webex.com/ is another option, though I haven't played with their linux client yet. It can be a real dog with desktop updates (advancing a slide can take several seconds to update at all of the clients). However if you do it the right way and use their PPT preloader & displayer, things should be smooth. Like VNC, you'd want to coordinate desktop resolutions beforehand... it doesn't do any type of scaling.
Finally if you're into building your own thing, you can grab a video capture card such as http://www.unigraf.fi/?page=64 and use Windows Media Encoder, VideoLAN, etc. to deliver video content from any PC source to your clients using streaming video. Lots of testing and tweaking required, but you can basically take any full motion video or 3D content and chuck it over a network in multiple bit rates, have a recording to archive and playback later, etc. And all everyone needs is a media player. Mind that audio is only one-way.
Adobe Acrobat with the multimedia plugin can show videos.
"How do Linux desktop users out there share presentations with others on the net?""
You asked.
WebDVD
Right. Evince. Like *that* doesn't leak memory like a sieve, on top of the huge amount it uses anyway. Poppler is getting better, but it's not quite there yet. Xpdf may be fugly as hell (it's a motif/lesstif app), but there really isn't any replacement for it yet.
Anyway's, I agree that PDF files are the way to go for presentation distributing. I personally like DVI for that purpose better, but most windoze users wouldn't know what to do with a DVI file, and AFAIK, Evince (& perhaps okular?) is the only pre-installed gui viewer that will display them, and most non-academics I know have never heard of xdvi (and TeX only because of LyX).
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
Poppler is getting better, but it's not quite there yet. Xpdf may be fugly as hell (it's a motif/lesstif app), but there really isn't any replacement for it yet.
Bingo. Poppler, a rendering library developed as an off-shoot of xpdf, somehow manages to perform worse than the original.
Case in point:
To add insult to injury, there are some rare cases when the on-screen render and printout of an image are different. A mangled image may print properly, but also a properly shown image may be printed as a black box.
The absolutely worst part is that if you print directly from LyX, the printing and rendering routines usually go through poppler. And what does that do to your images? Yep, well guessed. Effecfively the only way to print PDF's in a way that ensures their final outcome is to use xpdf. For LyX documents, this involves the extra step of exporting to PDF and printing from an external program.
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How about KPDF? Based on the xpdf engine, integrates nicely with KDE, more compatible than Acrobat Reader 7 in my experience (either that, or my students use really weird PDF generators).
Works very well. The Prosper style is actually a package with different backgrounds and designs. I find that they transfer very cleanly to PDF. In fact I use the Acrobat reader for presentations. The advantage is that it works very well also on Windows machines and Macs, i.e. you can present with an arbitrary computer, including embedded EPS graphics.
I also have some scripts that render the presentatio and create a page where all slides are given in sequence as antialiased 100dpi images, although I have stopped putting them up. PDF for download is fine.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The 2 methods I use are Open Office Presenter and PDF. Open Office allows saving in a variety of formats so that M$ Office users can see the presentation or those smart enough to be using Open Office can view the presentation. To avoid puting up several different files with different formats PDF is the way to go.
Some people dislike PDF, but truth be told, it is pretty portable. Anyone who is likely to need your presentation is probably going to be able to use PDF. There are however times when you'll need to include some animations and whatnot. This will sound sacrilegious to many, but truth is that PowerPoint can be read by many more applications than OpenDocument.
I used PDF when teaching at my colleges. You know exactly what it's going to look like, and you know it's guaranteed to work / look the same no matter if you're stuck in a classroom with a Windows Box, Linux Box, or you suddenly get tossed in a corner with one of the school's crappy old laptops. PDF may not have the bells and whistle's of a PowerPoint, but for me, it gets the job done.
A colleague here at the World Wide Web Consortium (Dave Raggett) wrote a JavaScript-based tool called Slidy to do presentations; it degrades to plain HTML without JavaScript/ECMAScript support. Changing the style involves putting some CSS in your HTML file, but it's fairly clearly documented. Most of us use it for our talks now.
If you put the talk up on the Web before the conference, you aren't tied to using your own laptop to present, which can be useful if you're sufficiently prepared. I rarely am, since I like to tailor a talk to the audience.
Liam
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Recenlty, a Presentation mode feature
has been added to GNU TeXmacs. Now
you can use the wysiwyg LaTeX quality
of TeXmacs together with the full-screen,
possibly iteractive presentation of a
set of slides.
http://www.texmacs.org/
http://www.google.com/search?q=generated-by-pyvnc2 swf
The w3c Slidy package, from the folks who brought you "tidy", is also excellent.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
I usually publish my slides in PDF format without page transition effects or other animations. When I give a talk, I use ``xpdf -fullscreen'' to show the PDF. xpdf is much faster than Acrobat: a single page jump in full screen mode took Acrobat 3 seconds, and less than 0.1 second for xpdf on my slides. And Acrobat Reader cannot switch to full screen mode (!) when the Gnome toolbar is present, i.e. it doesn't hide the toolbar.
I prepare my PDF slides with LaTeX using the powerdot document class. Previously I used pdfscreen.sty. There are various alternatives: other LaTeX classes and styles, and ConTeXt, which provides advanced typographic effects for presentations.
I didn't say that I used that particular software, genius. I use those techniques. Think outside your little box for once.
It's trivial to set up. Have your Beamer latex file editable via a wiki type web page, with a button to regenerate the pdf using pdflatex (i.e. you have a very simple script that calls pdflatex on your presentation file). Bingo - you can edit and view your presentation wherever you are in the world!
:-)
Beamer produces gorgeous presentations...
"Dr. Hajj" needs to give a "presentation" to people at a number of "remote locations"... I think this is an al Qaeda sort of thing, with bunkers and underground lairs, and "Meyerweb" sounds a bit too-politically incorrect for a muslim's tastes.
Really? I have found Evince to be much better than Xpdf. I haven't noticed any memory issues (but I haven't looked), and it seems faster. The first time I tried it crashed so much it was unusable, but the next time I tried it (several versions later) it was fine.
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Contraception, data integrity, making sure your presentation goes smoothly. All these are only done with any sense with redundancy.
If you make sure that the site has a combination of pdf, ppt, odp, etc copies of your presentation, you massively increase the chance of all being well. Just like if you're going for a normal presentation you take your laptop, the files on a usb key and a set of acetates/transparencies. Usually you won't need it, but just sometimes you'll be so glad you spent an extra few minutes taking precautions.
For remote stuff, assuming there's not much control over their system(s), ppt is the most frequently used option (therefore people know how to use it). So if the fancy VNC/remote desk/fancy X echo system goes wrong you can just get them to load the presentation on their system and say 'next slide'. This even works when people's network connections go down - it fails over all the way down to crowding around individual PCs and using a POTS conference call.
So, my advice? Try out something whizzy, because that could be really cool. But email them (and/or put on the web) copies of the presentation in a few formats as well.
www.shinkuro.com is likely the answer - check it out its free for now. rumor has it another version is in the works improving the UI.
oKular *is* the new Kpdf. It also uses poppler, and hence brings nothing new to the table, other than being a Qt-based app instead of a GTK-based app.
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
Yep. I was actually paid by my last employer for a couple of weeks to debug & plug memory leaks in poppler that I found profiling it in valgrind. I found two, one that was really bad, and one that wasn't so bad. It's really tough to do because PDF's are so damned complex. While there are many levels of indirection in the poppler/xpdf rendering code, it seems to be decently written, with a few exceptions. Memory is allocated in both the C++ and C way, and metadata specifying the method by which a chunk of memory is allocated is maintained with the allocated chunk. This is abstracted out so that there is (often) a single "smart" free() type of call that chooses the correct way to release/handle the memory (free or delete, realloc, etc).
To make things worse, there is a relatively sophisticated (to me!) caching subsystem that tricks valgrind into some false positives on leakage, so those had to be identified from the memory run traces. It was a mess.
Anyway, lots instantiations are flying around, so you end up matching pointer allocation/freeing and it's tedious. Unfortunately my company got cut in half before I finished, and I ended up in the half that needed new employment. I had just started playing with the memory debugging defines that are in the code, but they didn't seem to be terribly helpful for the particular leaks that I identified.
I'll probably go back some day and try to track down & finish my work, on my own time, but I'm not in any big hurry because debugging gui-library memory interactions for subtle memory leaks is not exactly the most fun open source side project. I personally can only do that for perhaps 2-3 hours at a time before my brain wants to completely shut down, or leave my head and drink scotch (or both).
I sincerely hope that I'm not the only with half-hearted interest in actually fixing memory utilization in that lib... that would be depressing. The project maintainer looks overworked and seems to be focusing on fixing crasholas and rendering bugs. At that rate, I seriously doubt he'll *ever* get to memory leaks.
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.