Yes, that was what I tried first (actually I have tried it both remotely and locally). Unfortunately the sorts of presentations I work with produce too complex PDF. Some of the time the viewer just crashes, the rest of the time it takes up to 10 seconds to display the next page! Not an option for a presentation in front of an audience.

However, I think I have found a good solution to that. PowerPoint can save a presentation as a series of JPG image files (or other image formats). These are quite easy for the tablet to handle. I believe the sisbit program will be fairly easy to extend to display jpegs (or some other format PPT supports) and then all I need is a script to drive it: to let me move forward and backwards through the image files. That is what I mean by the slideshow program.

I think that is also the right engineering solution: do as much preprocessing as possible before loading the files onto the tablet and keep the tablet's task down to managing the user experience, not doing complex processing. It even means we don't actually need X for slideshows!

I am willing to consider other ideas but that is the best I have come up with so far!