Greetings,

Although LibreOffice Impress is a great replacement for other proprietary software, it seems to be very slow on changing from one slide to another when used on relatively old computers.

It seems to have something to do with the Video Card being too old, as there is more than 400MB of free RAM available.

Is there an alternative that could just display the presentations a little faster than LibreOffice Impress?

Thanks in advance!

In LibreOffice Impress, did you disable any transition animations? Also, what are the specs of your PC?

If you really need an alternative, check out WPS Office (download link here). Keep in mind that it is proprietary, though.

1 members found this post helpful.

Actually I did. But it had no effect. Maybe I could try mounting a temporary FS inside the RAM and copying the file there, or installing the Sun's Official JRE and using it for LibreOffice instead of OpenJDK but I don't know if they will do much effect.

- I have actually installed Linux on many PC's. Each one has its own specs. But I believe mostly something between Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 (or their AMD equivalents), and 1GB RAM.
- I have installed Linux Mint 17 XFCE Edition which leaves me with about 400MB RAM free, if I disregard what is being used for caching.
- The Hard Disks are SATA, I just don't know if SATA I or SATA II.
- The Video Cards are a problem, I don't know exactly their capacity but they are mostly onboard. Probably this is what's causing the issue as everything else runs on a decent speed if you consider the hardware specs.

Thanks for the link. What do you mean by "proprietary"? It seems to be free of charge. Is it free for personal and commercial use but closed source?

Yes, it's closed source. I should have said that it had a proprietary license. Is it working?

Also, what is the filetype of the presentation?

I would have to try at monday when I have access to the computers again. As for the presentation, it's .ppt/.pptx but I have tried to convert into .odp and open it again with no effect.

Thanks for your solution. Hopefully that software could provide a faster mean of showing presentations.

I use Beamer A LaTeX class for producing presentations. I am extremely pleased with the power and performance of this software. Highly recommended.
jdk

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the suggestion. Does it show .ppt/.pptx natively?

Sorry, I misunderstood your question. Beamer is not a viewer of pre-existing presentation files. It is a producer of presentations. I don't understand why you would want/expect Beamer to show .ppt files. If you want to produce presentations using MSOffice then the end product (I guess) would be a .ppt file. But why would you want to produce presentations with MSOffice?
jdk

Hi,

save the file as a pdf and then try a few different pdf viewers. Eg evince, zathura, xpdf etc...

Evo2.

The computers will be in a classroom. They will be used as Linux + LibreOffice platforms that will display slides that professors will make at home, probably using Windows + Office or they software they desire.



That's a very good alternative, but I would like to save trouble for the end user... They will be already "forced" to deal with Linux when they are completely used to Windows.

Hi,
Sounds a little more like they are being forced to use hardware that is either not up to the task or perhaps not optimally configured.

If you can you provide more information about your setup we may be able to help you squeeze out a little more performance.

For example the output of the following two commands might help:
Evo2.

Apparently you can use TeX based software on windows.
source: http://latex-project.org/ftp.html

So the students could run Latex on their windows machines (or Macs) and so use Beamer to create their presentations. Beamer's end product can be a .pdf file so displaying the results would not be a problem.
jdk

Hi,
Hang on, it looks like the solution is to ensure the profs provide their slides as pdf, not just some random format. This means the presentations can be created using whatever software the profs choose, but ensures that they can be displayed everywhere.

Evo2.

If you use older hardware, you can also use the older software. For example OpenOffice.org 2.4.

The other propriatry option is SoftMaker's office suite. They've been on the market very long but are not known so widely outside of Germany or Europe. There is a free (zero-cost, not libre) edition called Freeoffice and a paid edition called SoftMaker Office. It should be pretty compatible with MSO. The paid version can be bought really cheap if upgrading from FreeOffice (you are allowed to buy an upgrade license if you already have Freeoffice installed).

The other FOSS (free and open source software) alternatives are not compatible with ppt(x) format.

Hello,

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. Unfortunately I already had to ship the computers as they were to another location. I have remote access through VNC but it's hard to see any performance increase not being physically present.

The quickest solution I had found due to my available time to ship them was to indeed Export as PDF. But that itself didn't make the presentations quicker. What made it was to reduce the Image Resolution to 75 DPI, the lowest value possible. It was still a little slow, but much quicker than using Impress. As Impress already have this feature, the overall directions given to the users was to bring them as .ppt(x) and convert them to .pdf choosing 75 DPI.

What would be the idea to squeeze out a little more performance? Do you have any links about what could be done, for future references? Linux Mint 17 XFCE was already running at a pretty decent speed, so no doubts the video cards were at their limits and all the rest of the hardware was fine with the O.S.


About using TeX, wouldn't it force the professors to not being able to create at home their slides on .ppt(x)?


About installing older versions of Open/Libre Office and/or using other paid software, unfortunately it would break the main purpose of installing Linux on these machines that was to have the most up-to-date software without many performance issues and to have zero cost on the Software.