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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/
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";}
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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).
I'm a university teacher and I think there's nothing most annoying than a powerpoint presentation that doesn't work on a particular setup. So even if I did use Windows, I wouldn't use Powerpoint. I exclusively use PDF like you do. It always worked on any setup I used to find (Mac, Windows, Linux, even our old outdated Solaris on the Sun machines).
No, it doesn't move, you can't do animation at all, nor any cool transition. But I personaly think it's a plus side.
I hate all sigs, mine included.
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.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- 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.
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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.