Small Laptop to run presentations - EEE?

[ctk.houston]

Greetings,

I'm currently looking for a portable solution for our projection needs. Because I use Sibelius to export graphics so I can project lyrics AND music notation, typical worship software doesn't help me at all. I'm currently using Keynote to design the slides (I'm on a powerbook).

Our church is looking to start projection in the fall. I'm wondering exporting slides to PPT from Keynote and then load them in OpenOffice Impress is a workable solution. Would an Asus eee be a computer hefty enough to run the presentations. I'd like to have simply a small screen laptop (<10") running the projector. Does the eee have enough power to display on a second monitor? Is Impress even a workable solution? Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks for any help you can give,
Eric

[[Director] Joseph B]

I would think your MAC Book would be able to handle what you want to do. If you go with MAC I'm no help as I don't know MAC Software but I can tell you that I think worship software is the way to go. I sell Media Shout but the best way to see what will work best for you is to download some trial versions of the most popular and see how they "fit".
There are even several open source programs (as in free) that work very well. You can PM me if you decide to go witi Media Shout for a good price but DO try out a few before you decide.

[TMcKellar]

My personal opinion is that it would probably be rough trying to use the EEE pc. Here's what my two main concerns would be with it. 1) limited amount of ram, hard drive space, and processor speed. You can get models with about an 8gb hard drive and 1gb of ram but the max you can get with the processor speed is 900mHz. 2) although I'm a devout Linux user it will probably be more complicated getting dual monitors setup if you decide to go with a dual monitor setup. That combined with shared integrated graphics won't give you a whole lot to play around with.

For what you would pay for one of the EEE pc's I'd say just build a desktop. For the base price of an EEE ($300) you can build a desktop that will be more than capable of what you need it to do now and it will be something you can grow with too. If you really want to go with a laptop check newegg.com to see what all they have. The laptop market in the $600 to $800 range are pretty powerful machines nowadays. I know Dell now sells laptops with Ubuntu Linux on them now as well. I know I gave you the whole "dual monitors with Linux is tricky" speech above but it may be a way to save a little money over getting a laptop with windows on it. My vote is still to just get a desktop though.

As for software Openoffice Impress should probably be able to handle what you need from it. If you go with windows Freepath may be an option too. Also check out www.freeforchurches.com. They have a list of free worship software you can check out. One of them might be able to fill your needs.

EDIT: Along the lines of JB's mention of open source software, I'm on the Openlp.org team so I though I'd give a shameless plug. A cross platform version is planned for version 2. Currently it is only available for Windows.

[waynehoskins]

How important is the music notation? Among other things, if it's for the congregation, I think you'll have troubles with the music being rather small as projected, and people in the back of the room (and anyone with lousy eyesight like mine) probably won't be able to clearly read the music anyway.

I agree that worship software is probably the way to go, if you can do without projecting the sheet music. Worship software really makes life much easier than a linear presentation system like Powerpoint/Keynote.

I can recommend two open-source programs from experience (the only open-source ones I've tried, and the others have a following too). Opensong is stable on Windows and MacOS (they're working on a Linux build too but it's very new and not quite ready for prime time). Lyricue runs on Linux, and it's what I'm running now. Two other names I've heard are Easislides and OpenLP.

The big commercial names include Mediashout, Songshow Plus, and Easyworship; they're pretty polished and each has different strengths. All of them (even the ones I forgot) have short-term trials so you can demo it and see if it works for you. I'd recommend doing that and seeing if it fits the bill.

On the hardware, I'm not familiar with that machine, but the more horsepower the machine has (memory and video memory especially), the better it will play. Desktop machines are preferred, but laptops get used for that all the time.

[waynehoskins]

By the way, a footnote on the dual monitors for Linux thing, Chris Debenham (the Lyricue guy) has that down solid .. that was the big thing the Opensong guys were having troubles with the other month. The configuration is a little rocky but moderately straightforward. In fact, as we speak I'm working on throwing together a desktop machine for exactly your application (sans sheet music) to run Lyricue. One of these days I need to write up a howto to get the xserver config right (at least under Debian/Ubuntu/Gnome).

The machine I built for this that lives at the church is a moderately beefy, fast, light machine that cost somewhere around $600 in parts .. this second machine is built from old used parts, so it's free so far .. we'll see how well it goes.

[TMcKellar]

I'm just speaking from experience on the wonky dual monitor setup. If you go with Linux, buy a card with an Nvidia chipset. I've got an Ati and 1) can't use anything other than the open source radeon driver on Ubuntu and Fedore, and 2) can't get the dvi output to work with the aforementioned open source ati drivers. Like I said, just my experiences.

[cjlowe]

Having played with the eeePC, I can only say that its graphics card and processor just aren't good enough for presentations.

Oh, and OpenOffice Impress.... really doesn't impress. If it's all you've got, it's better than nothing, but it's definitely the weak point of OpenOffice.

[ctk.houston]

Thanks for all of the advice everyone. You've given me a lot to think about/mull over.

[Dan Rector]

I would think you'd have better results if you were to just start in Impress instead of converting from Keynote to PPT to Impress. You are much more likely to lose something, fonts, graphics, etc along the way. Isn't there a version of Open Office or a spinoff for the Mac?

Dan

[cjlowe]

Yes, there's both OpenOffice and NeoOffice.