Discovering KeyJnote for smooth presentations

A while back I blogged about my experiences in convincing OpenOffice Impress to display text bullets on a slide one after another instead of showing them all at once. Back then, I also toyed around with how to softly fade between two presentation slides, as OOo provided a lot of different effects for this (yes, I succumb to eyecandy but I know you should not overload your slides with too many of it). While I got it working in the end, I found it quite time consuming to apply the effect for each and every slide and the transitions were not as smooth as I would have hoped (I am not sure if it's OOo or the X server itself that is so slow in rendering full screen updates).

While listening Sebastian Kügler's FrOSCon presentation about KDE World Domination, I was quite stunned by the very soft transitions between his slides and what kind of effects were used. After he also quickly switched between an overview mode and individual slides by quickly zooming out and into another slide, I was quite convinced that he had to be using Keynote on a Mac. Which I personally would have found confusing, given that he was there to talk about how to promote the KDE desktop

I was delighted to learn that he was actually using KeyJnote, which is a little Python script that takes any PDF as an input file to generate the slide show. Alternatively, you can point it to a directory with pictures, that will then be used for the slide show. It uses OpenGL for the rendering, so it requires a proper DRI setup. Fortunately SUSE Linux 10.1 already ships with all the required components to get the script working (In addition to Python and Ghostscript, it requires the following RPMs to be installed: pdftk, python-imaging, python-opengpython-pygame). As I can finally use the ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility GPU in my IBM Thinkpad T42 Laptop with the free r300 3D-driver, I of course had to give it a try and am quite happy with it!

To ease the installation of the script, I've now built an RPM for SUSE Linux 10.1, which you can now download from my RPM download section. It might work on older SUSE releases as well, as long as the RPM dependencies are fulfilled. Have fun!