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?"

S5

[Anonymous Coward]

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ [meyerweb.com]

Re:

[arodland]

Ditto. S5 or Spork.

Or Slidy...

[mengel]

The w3c Slidy [w3.org] package, from the folks who brought you "tidy", is also excellent.

Re:

[schestowitz]

Indeed. Got about 70 S5 presentations up there. OO.org also exports as HTML (very flexible).

Re:

[Dr_Hajj]

I like Slidy and S5, but I was hoping that I could control the transition from slide to slide. I know I can create PDFs of the slides and distribute them, but I don't like having to tell the remote users to move on to the next slide every time.

.odp

[rdwald]

OpenDocument Presentations [wikipedia.org], maybe?

OpenOffice.org

[Mini-Geek]

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.

Re:

[Azarael]

That is my answer as well. Instead of emailing them, you can post them on the company intranet or a wiki though. You could even throw together some html slides driven by javascript if you have the time.

Re:

[gotgenes]

+1 and a "me too" to this. Some of the Virginia Tech Linux/Unix Users Group members and I just gave a two-day crash course in using Linux. The presentations were created with OpenOffice and presented both with OOo and Evince. The presentations were distributed to our audience before-hand and remain downloadable as PDFs, created via OOo, of course. See the VTLUUG site [vt.edu] for yourself.

PDF

[Anonymous Coward]

PDF

PDF

[Skuld-Chan]

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).

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't hate PDFs. PDFs are a great file format. What I hate is clicking a link and having my computer slow to a crawl for several seconds as some bloated PDF-reader plugin loads.

Re:

[orasio]

I assume you have Adobe Reader, and a windows machine. You must have the wrong default configuration. Not every piece of software works ok without post install configuration, Adobe Reader is an example. You should configure your browser to not use the adobe plugin installed. Reader just doesn't integrate ok with browsing, and I haven't tried any alternative.

At the XP machine I use at work, I just disable the plugin, and download the file. That way, when I open it, it doesn't mess with firefox at all. On lin

Re:

[BigFootApe]

Indeed, PDF is nice. Especially when it's used with Beamer [sourceforge.net].

Re:PDF using Evince

[cloricus]

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.

Re:

[BigFootApe]

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.

Re:

[Mr. Jaggers]

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

Re:PDF using Evince

[Bostik]

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:

1. Create a PDF file with embedded graphics (figures, charts, sequence diagrams, ...)
2. Open the PDF with evince.
3. Note, how some of the images are rendered wrong on the screen. (In fact, they render as black boxes that have only a vague resemblance to the major outlines of the original images.)
4. Print the document. The print will result in the same misrendered images being printed in the same black box fashion.
5. Resize evince's window back and forth until the image is rendered properly.
6. Print the document. The print will now have the image as it should appear.

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.

Re:

[Novus]

Xpdf may be fugly as hell (it's a motif/lesstif app), but there really isn't any replacement for it yet.

How about KPDF [kde.org]? 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).

Re:

[Mr. Jaggers]

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.

Re:

[Randle_Revar]

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.

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 late

Re:

[Mr. Jaggers]

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 o

Re:

[Petrushka]

Well ... you could even use Acrobat. Or Acrobat Reader. Or Adobe Reader. Or whatever they're calling it now. If that's against your religion, then oh well, ignore me.

Re:

[oyenstikker]

No Acrobat for Linux. Just reader.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

So? There are a gazillion ways to make a PDF that don't require Acrobat. Heck, OpenOffice has a PDF writer built in. There are also some good LaTeX presentation packages that make real nice PDFs with pdflatex.

Re:

[zCyl]

There are a gazillion ways to make a PDF that don't require Acrobat. Heck, OpenOffice has a PDF writer built in.

Indeed. I usually make my presentations with OpenOffice (in ooimpress). That way, I can save them as odp, powerpoint, or pdf.

Re:

[level_headed_midwest]

GNU Ghostscript.

Re:

[CronoCloud]

It'll compile on practically anything.

Re:

[oyenstikker]

Acrobat does more than generating PDFs from other files. For example, my job requires me to make PDF Forms. I have to run Windows in VMWare just to run Acrobat.

Re:

[narrowhouse]

FYI you can use scribus to make PDF forms. I can't vouch for overall stability or ease of use, but it does have that function.

Re:

[richlv]

openoffice.org has some form options in it's pdf export dialog. i have never used them myself, but maybe that saves you some ram ;)

Re:PDF

[c_fel]

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.

Re:

[epee1221]

Most of the professors in the CS department here use PDFs for lecture notes. It lets them switch easily between the departments Windows and Linux machines, and it means that students (no matter what kind of computer they have) can view them outside of class.

That said, I'm curious as to why you say that no animation is a plus.

Re:

[tclark]

That said, I'm curious as to why you say that no animation is a plus.

I've found that in most cases, the quality of the information presented is inversely proportional to the degree of flashiness of the presentation. It's sort of a "Those who can do, those who cannot produce pretty power point slides" thing.

Re:

[shreevatsa]

I agree completely. Those animations, sounds and "cool" transitions serve only to distract. Perhaps they're fine when the intent of the presentation is to impress, but when it is intended to actually convey some content, one is better off without them. PDFs are clearly better; they work everywhere, and look exactly the same too.

In this case, if all the parties know LaTeX, then nothing could be better than using Beamer [sourceforge.net]. Thrown in a CVS repository too, and you have the perfect collaboration system.

Re:

[EvanED]

In all fairness, sometimes a video clip is an appropriate addition to a presentation. Using PDF means you have to change to another program to show it, while using Powerpoint means you could put it inline, which is slightly slicker when it works.

Re:

[egypt_jimbob]

In all fairness, sometimes a video clip is an appropriate addition to a presentation. Using PDF means you have to change to another program to show it, while using Powerpoint means you could put it inline, which is slightly slicker when it works.

I agree; sometimes video is useful. But you made a strong point against it yourself: "when it works." How many times have you seen it work? In presentations I've seen using video in a Powerpoint, I would venture a guess at about 25%. The other three-fourths of t

Re:

[perbert]

Actually, if you use the "prosper" LaTeX style (built on top of the "seminar" style), you can make the cool transitions with a PDF slide show. http://prosper.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] would be the first place to look. It's quite a robust package, IMO.

Re:

[value_added]

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.

That's incorrect. Transitions in PDF have been around for years. Additionally, you can perform all sorts of fun javascript/multimedia stuff.

PDF Transitions Made Easy [planetpdf.com]

With judicious use, transitions can be effective.

Re:

[4of12]

you can't do animation at all

I haven't used it myself, but Alexander Grahn's movie15 package [tug.org] purports to embed animations into LaTeX PDF documents.

Re:

[chris_sawtell]

And the LaTeX class called Beamer [sourceforge.net] produces the really beautiful pdf slide files for kpdf [kde.org] to display.

Re:

[blakestah]

Problem....

PDF presenters do not auto-load the next slide....this leads to an uncomfortable silence between the time you try to advance the slide, and the time the slide actually advances. This effect depends on how complicated the next slide is.

PDF cannot embed audio/video, so if you want a multimedia presentation you are screwed.

You cannot draw onto a slide to explain your point.

I've used MagicPoint [wide.ad.jp], which works fine. You make each slide into a standalone graphics file, like a JPEG or GIF or PDF. Then, y

Re:

[lahvak]

PDF presenters do not auto-load the next slide....this leads to an uncomfortable silence between the time you try to advance the slide, and the time the slide actually advances. This effect depends on how complicated the next slide is.

That's true, but I have never seen any slide show where this would be a problem, and I have seen some pretty complicated slides.

PDF cannot embed audio/video, so if you want a multimedia presentation you are screwed.

Wrong. PDF can embed audio/video just fine. The only problem

Re:

[UtucXul]

Wrong. PDF can embed audio/video just fine. The only problem is that you cannot view these on Linux. If you want to embed audio or video with pdflatex, look at the movie15 package.

Actually, with Acrobat Reader 7 on gnu/linux, embedded movies (at least the ones I've made with the pdfanim LaTeX package) work perfectly. It isn't perfect since it doesn't work with xpdf, but it still seems to be the most cross-platform movie in a presentation I've ever seen.

Re:

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

That's true, but I have never seen any slide show where this would be a problem, and I have seen some pretty complicated slides.

I have, on slides with large images, either when loading directly from a CD, or on the less-than-cutting-edge machine that happens to be connected to the projector.

PDF good for classrooms

[neonprimetime]

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.

OpenOffice.org works great

[martinultima]

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.

Presentation

[md_lasalle]

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!

Re:

[moonka]

What if they need to print it out? I frequently print out teacher's slides.

Re:

[md_lasalle]

very good point... maybe some screen shot can be good... but if it doesnt need animations...probably pdf would be the safest choice

Re:

[ID10T5]

The best way to make sure your presentation works on every system, is simply making a swf Flash file...

I take it you haven't tried that on a 64-bit system running a native 64-bit browser. People have been asking for a 64-bit version of Falsh Player since the Athlon 64 came out (~3 years) and still no dice.

Re:

[zsau]

Or PPC/Linux. PDFs are a lot more compatible, and they can be printed.

UltraVNC Java viewer.

[IpSo_]

For online presentations, I use Ultra VNC's [sourceforge.net] 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".

Re:

[munpfazy]

Interesting.

I've been contemplating doing something similar, except I expected to use TightVNC, since I'd never heard of UltraVNC's java viewer before. Many thanks for the suggestion.

Only problem is that the presentations are often hosted on a laptop connected to some random NAT wireless access point that I don't control. I've been meaning to put together something so that presenters can seamlessly ssh-tunnel to one of our servers to which the vnc clients can then connect, but haven't had a chance yet. H

Re:

[IpSo_]

I know you can pick which port you want to use with the viewer. But no, I haven't used it in a scenario where I didn't control the firewall I was behind. UltraVNC does offer a repeater [uvnc.com] that is supposed to solve this problem, though YMMV.

Re:

[AvitarX]

I persoanlly leave the presentation on a non-natted computer at a location that has good bandwidth. Using the tunnel doubles the bandwidth usage at the non-firewalled computer. Also this allows you to caccess and control the presentation from any computer with Java and a Web-browser instead of just your laptop.

UltraVNC has nice file transfer and single window options too (for if you have the client).

Re:

[Fian]

I have also used the Java-VNC solution successfully quite a few times. The only caveat I'd put on it is you should get each remote site to make a test connection prior to the *real* presentation. Many companies now firewall the appropriate ports so their employees can run the viewer but it can't connect.

Re:

[LWATCDR]

If you had the bandwidth couldn't you use a streaming audio setup in place of the phone line?
Even better would be some way to add audio to the UltraVNC protocol. Sounds like a potentially fun project.

Keep it simple: html pages

[webgang]

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;

Re:

[netsharc]

Opera has started implementing some CSS2 that makes it easy to make full-screen presentations using only the browser, Looky here [opera.com]. When the browser goes to full screen mode, it starts using the @media projection rules, so you can write a plain HTML file, and make it look nice for presentation by using CSS rules. Which is.. neat.

Obvious answer

[nazsco]

> 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.

JXTA-Remote-Desktop

[abrotman]

https://jxta-remote-desktop.dev.java.net/ [java.net] might be useful for you.

www.ifolder.com

[Cold_Lestat]

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/ [ifolder.com]

PDF or S5 and CVS

[gbobeck]

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.

Gatherplace.net

[knewter]

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)

C

Missing the point?

[Micah]

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.)

Re:

[whoever57]

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?

Yes. WebEX has good support for Linux.

Yes. WebEX has good support for Linux.

[jimpop]

I'll second that. WebEX works for me, and has worked well for years.

Re:

[billlion]

In the academic community we use the Access Grid for video conferencing and shared presentations over the internet. When I last used it it worked fine with linux. The presentation on my linux laptop was shared with all the other nodes using vnc.

Re:

[aminorex]

web-conferencing-central.com and gatherplace.net both support Linux and OSX as well as Windows, with no downloads required (just an applet). Neither gotomeeting nor webex can match that. And webex costs much more.

PresenterNet

[IANAAC]

I haven't personally tried this service, but it looks promising. I found it through Gizmo - I use that and the freeconferencecall.com service they provide.

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

LaTeX Beamer to create PDF presentations

[DrJimbo]

The The LaTeX Beamer class [sourceforge.net] 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.

Re:

[basiles]

There is also active dvi or advi. It provide animations, ability to include any X11 program (ie an xterm) inside a slide to make a demo, etc... http://pauillac.inria.fr/advi/ [inria.fr] for more

I do this for a living

[rwa2]

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.

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 :P ).

http://webex.com/ [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 [unigraf.fi] 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.

Re:

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

This is offtopic spam. I don't see anything about Linux or free software on that site.

Re:

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I didn't say that I used that particular software, genius. I use those techniques.

I'm not the genius who just failed to communicate my thoughts clearly, and then blamed the somebody else for it.

LaTeX, Prosper style and PDF

[gweihir]

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 sto

PowerPoint or PDF

[robteix]

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.

Re:

[lahvak]

You can actually include animations, and even multimedia into a pdf. Linux version of reader does not display embeded multimedia, but you can still use javascript driven animations. I have seen it done many times, and I have done it myself.

Talks at W3C

[Ankh]

A colleague here at the World Wide Web Consortium (Dave Raggett) wrote a JavaScript-based tool called Slidy [w3.org] 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, sin

vnc2swf

[i621148]

http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/ [unixuser.org]

http://www.google.com/search?q=generated-by-pyvnc2 swf [google.com]

PDF, LaTeX, powerdot

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Don't rely on just one method

[imagin8or]

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 minute

Sharing Presentation on linux, mac and pc

[david.waldrop]

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.