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!

Well, it'd be handiest to have the slideshow all in one file; PDF is the best suited format I know (resolution independent and all), but if we haven't got the oomph...
(I don't generally have a problem, after setting settings in either PrimoPDF or OOo suitable for such work, but I assume you know what you're doing, and have made appropriate choices.)

We could, of course, bundle the jpegs into a pdf, one per page. But we've just tossed the main benefit of pdfs, and keeping the overhead seems mildly ******ed. The only benefit from this approach is pdf compatibility for those presentations that do work well.

Probably the best choice is a tarball of images; any pdf that would work well can, after all, be rendered into such a tarball on the tablet fairly quickly (while walking to the location of the presentation).

I'd suggest just a gzipped tar of ppms, which will be displayed in lexical order, but it's also possible to use an index in the tar; perhaps that would be good for storing notes to be displayed on the tablet screen.

A script to display a series of images, advancing on enter, would be trivial; but a C helper program is probably in order to allow reversing conveniently. It might be worth making a Hildon app to control it, allowing a thumbnail view, current slide & notes, etc. on the tablet side, but with xterm, a shell script, and said helper, you could get notes, previous and next slide titles, and obviously flipping slides with the arrow keys to work well for 1% the effort.

Got my StarTech adaptor today from newegg along with a 7-port D-Link USB hub (interestingly, this is currently the only USB hub at my parents house), and played with the VGA out. It's quite, cool. Thanks, Graham!

Flickr set

I'm getting one in about a month (when things slow down). I wish I had had it today; I had to give a presentation (from PDF) on the professor's macbook. What a pain, but using my laptop was being an even bigger pain. Ability to plug N800 into projector would have been awesome, both for swiftness of setup and for impressing the prof, who had previously asked if my N800 was an iPhone, and was somewhat skeptical as to my claim that it was better.

On the swift aand convenient note, having to use a powered hub is a particularly irritating inconvenience A AA-powered hub would probably be an option, but what about some sort of inline power injector?

I have created an updated version (V0.2) of the proof-of-concept. The major change is that sisbit now knows how to display JPEGs and I have created a very simple slideshow script that can be used from Xterm to display slides.

Instructions on how to download and use the software are now on the project web pages: http://xsisusb.garage.maemo.org/. Please disregard the instructions given earlier in this thread. The "how-to" on showing PowerPoint slides is at http://xsisusb.garage.maemo.org/powerpoint.html.

There are still several additional tasks which we really need to complete including: optimising X-server updates; creating a more powerful slideshow script; and further researching the Powerpoint display options to be able to have good quality and high speed both at the same time! If you are interested in working on these or other developments, please look at the project pages on https://garage.maemo.org/projects/xsisusb/ and join the discussion list. You do not need to be a developer to help with these!

This is very cool indeed. I'm very much looking forward to testing this out myself. Targus docking stations are just 90 euros. they should do the trick nicely.

Very cool stuff indeed! A few points of interest/questions/thoughts... first off, just in general, are most of the USB-VGA adapters based on the SiS chipset, or are there a whole slew of different chips out there? I know that there are at least two different versions of the Startech adapters (usb2vga, usb2vga2) that support different resolutions, and there are also some by other manufacturers... but of course, nobody in their right mind reveals chipset information ;o)

One item in my research that really caught my eye is that in addition to their USB2VGA adapters, Startech also makes a complete docking station solution:
http://www.startech.com/item-specs/U...g-Station.aspx
I'm kind of hoping they'd use the same chipset for the VGA adapter build into that bad boy... and we've got pretty good support for Network adapters with the various kernel modules that are available, and since the thing has it's own power source it's also going to eliminate the need for a powered hub. Now, not exactly the most compact portable solution (though I still can't find dimensions on the blummen thing anywhere), but for presentations/or at a fixed place like home it would be an awesome one USB cable solution to a lot of needs. If anyone's interested I can source them for about $120 Cdn; I just don't have the extra cash to pick one up at the moment to play with!
I can also get my hands on the USB2VGA and USB2VGA2 adapters (the latter being slightly more expensive as apparently they do a slightly higher resolution?) and I will get them up for purchase in a new "developers" category on my site in the next few days hopefully... they're somewhere in the $100 Cnd range, so not cheap, but if they work, would be worth while!

Thanks again for all the great work so far!
-Rob

I was tempted by those USB2VGA adapters, but between uncertainty over whether they'd work and the higher resolution anyway, I went with the USB2VGA2; I couldn't find anything about chipsets, either, though the driver is identical AFAICT.

The USB2DVI is also interesting, but different drivers means it's probably not the same chipset, and it costs even more.

That station looks interesting. The video conditions match the USB2VGA2, so I'd bet that it's the same chipset. I'm not sure how likely it is that the audio could be made to work, but the ethernet's reasonably likely, and the hub + VGA would be dandy...

But the 6-in-1, with no audio or video, but with PS/2 mouse and keyboard (who doesn't have a pair of those kicking around somewhere?), parallel, and serial, in addition to the RJ-45 and USB hub, is even cheaper, and also interesting as an actual usable dock for desktop use of the N800; especially if its connector was glue-ganged with a power adapter, and perhaps one of your audio splitter cables for speakers and desktop mic.

I'm not ready to jump for either of those at the moment, but they're both possibilities in the future. (Right now, I have one of those spider hubs modded and working, and am waiting for time to do a tidy job on the other one with pictures online... USB2VGA2 is on the way, so I don't have all that much use for either docking station, nor all that much time for playing with it.)

By the way, qwerty12 has noticed that Nokia have included the sisusbvga driver in the initfs for Diablo so I plan to drop the sisusbvga package and stop supporting chinook. The chinook module will remain in SVN in case it is useful to anyone.

Any objections?