what's a reliable, easy to use slide show presenter?

[Michael Shiloh]

Hey, I wanted to let everyone know the follow-up to this conversation, 
as it was an interesting exercise with a valuable lesson.

Big Plus:
I ended up using kuickshow, as it was the only program I could find that 
would scale (for display only) every image during a show to the maximum 
screen size, without having to know that screen size in advance. This 
was important because I didn't know the projector resolution beforehand.

I actually had two kuickshows running on different virtual windows: one 
was cycling through an assortment of slides, while the second I would 
advance manually to correspond to my talk. I jumped between the two by 
jumping between the virtual windows.

Big Minus:
Big disadvantage of kuickshow: I couldn't see an option to cycle through 
slides randomly. I may look into filing a feature request.

Big Lesson:
Big lesson learned: It took us a long time to get the projector to 
display from my laptop. It took a combination of the screen resolution 
applet, the Thinkpad Fn buttons, and rebooting, and truthfully, I'm not 
sure exactly what did it. We finally got it to work mirroring my laptop 
screen, so I didn't have any secrets - whatever I typed was in front of 
the audience. This actually was amusing because I opened a terminal to 
invoke kuickshow. Later someone from the audience came up and said "Wow, 
you do robots, fire, and command line. Really cool." (The talk was about 
machine art.)

I have to figure out how to enable an external monitor reliably before I 
talk in public again (which will be in Israel next month).

Thanks everyone for your input - as always you are a very helpful and 
informative group, and I learned from all of your replies, not just the 
one I ended up using. For instance, I had no idea that ImageMagick had 
so many features.

Shalom,
Michael





Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
> Oron Peled <oron at actcom.co.il> writes:
> 
>>> at the very least, i want to point it at a directory of images, and 
>>> cycle through them, pausing for a couple of seconds on each picture.
>> If it's only images (no text slides), than you can simply point
>> digikam at the directory and press the slide show button.
> 
> Another option (images only, your computer, KDE app) is kuickshow.
> 
> If you don't know which computer you will be using, and/or it is a
> general presentation (not just images), go with PDF. On Linux I
> actually prefer kpdf to display slides, but acroread may be more
> common and more familiar.
>