I have been putting a slide show presentation together using Libre Office Impress. It's going well and I'm impressed by how easy to use and good impress is. The only problem is I need to be able to make the slide show into an exe file, it will be for an audio visual show at my local camera club and the software on their projector needs the file to be in this format. I can't see any way to make the file into an exe using impress and I've had a look around but can't find any programmes for Linux that I can use to do this. So I'm wondering if anyone has tried to make a exe slide show file on a Linux system before? And if so what programme did they use and where would it be available?

Thanks for any info on this.

I dont know if this will help or not.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 850AAVhKfv

First thoughts, not going to be easy.

A quick hunt round for "free converters" comes up with this possibility.

LO (I am on LO 4.1.4.2 & PCLOS 32 bit) will save as a swf (flash) file.

This windoze app will wrap it up in a player as an exe file. It will run in WINE
http://sourceforge.net/projects/swftools/

looks like this in PCLOS http://i.imgur.com/b20axiN.jpg

Tried the slideshow in a Win7 VM and it works there.

One big caveat: A quick test and the text animations are lost. Probably slide transitions as well.
It should be possible to work around bullet-ed lists by having duplicated incremental slides.

Hopefully someone will come up with something better.

Thanks for the ideas Molly and Rich. Unfortunately I don't have windows any more, couldn't think of a reason to keep it. Ho hum, best laid plans and all that.

Converted the file to an swf but there's nothing on Mint that I can find to run it. Something about a shockwave decoder not being there and apparently there isn't one for Linux. I did managed to open the file in FireFox but none of the slide transitions work unless by using a mouse click for each one and the music that I'm using won't play either. The shockwave player plugin is installed in firefox.
Looks like I'm going to have to install wine before I go any further on this one. It was something I was hoping to avoid as it don't look like the most straight forward of things to do.
I have got an old win98 disk so I'm not sure if I could set that up to run in a virtual machine just for testing the exe file?

Caz, what flavor of Linux are you using. I use Fedora so I joined a Fedora Forum. If you can try that, you might have some luck. If it Ubuntu or whatever, I think there are forums for them all.

I think you are going to be struggling on all fronts: linux, LO impress and the .exe requirement.
That .exe requirement means some involvement with Windows is a necessity.

Plan B could be, find a Win machine, see if the LO file as a ppt (powerpoint) export works - not a given. Then there are ppt to .exe convertors but seem to be payware & expensive.

Maybe a bit of lateral thinking

Plan C
If it is a straight non-interactive presentation, maybe a slideshow video converted to exe. LO should save that presentation to individual frames.
Linux has a few apps that will do this. Have a look for photofilmstrip. It will make an avi with audio.
Back to windows & maybe WINE, this might work, although I have not tried it.
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive ... to_exe.cfm
Makeinstantplayer
http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/M ... 69154.html

edit: best of luck

Isn't there also libre power point to use with linux

I've managed to get Wine working but the whole thing is turning into more of a headache than I really need. I can run a impress slide show through a Wine flash player but all sounds and transitions are lost so I've come up with a great idea... give up. I will ask down the club if the slide show has to be an exe, if so then it's one of the events that I will sit out.

Cheers for the help on this.

Couple of thougths, maybe irrelevant:

Native LibreOffice seems to be possibility since both Windows and Linux versions exist.

However, I bet you could convert your slideshow frames to suitable movie format with OpenShot, KDEnlive or whatever you use. I guess the projector is capable of showing moving image this way? If your slides are not full of animation (which is bad anyway) it could work.

Thanks, kimppi. Open Shot and KDEnlive look good. I haven't tried either one yet but I'll give one or both of them a go. Could be the answer I'm looking for.

Are you sure you have the correct information about the presentation projector requiring an *.exe file?
Is it possible to find out the make and model of this projector and the software they use?

Thanks for your interest in this. I have fired an e-mail off to the club secretary and as soon as I hear something back I'll post the info here. Cheers.

That is what I thought, a strange requirement.

I have given a few presentations at our local computer group, which used to meet at a school computer lab.

Great gear, but all Windows computers.
Depending on the presentation, I would go 3 ways

1.Take my linux laptop along, plug it in to the projector (VGA connection) set the appropriate screen resolution and try and persuade them to use linux.

2. Another way, take a live linux disk along, boot this up on the computer connected to projector. Use a usb memory stick to hold the presentation.

2a. Come to think of it there is an windows portable libreoffice that might be the answer.

3. The final one for when you absolutely do not know what hardware is going to be available. Write it in HTML, kompozer is available in most distros.
Not difficult to use. Make a link to the next page. Not many computers around that do not have a web browser.

rich2005, all good ideas.


BTW, Impress can export presentations as HTML (series of web pages), no animation or transitions but there is (a 4th option) Flash export for that.

On kubuntu i use often Xnview (with wine) because may run well photoshop filters, convert from a to a lot of format
...and what you search :
it may create a slideshow from any series of images and save as exe.
I never tested this on Ubuntu , i suppose will work ,i just had no occasion to try .

Of all Windows program Xnview is the only i would miss on linux, ..i would because instead works pretty well with wine
(BTW there is also a linux version, but i was very deluded when i tried, so much to lose any interest in future multiplatform version and stick to the full windows version with wine, that is perfect for my needs
And back to the point can create slideshow (and export as exe) from any group of images on the fly

Thanks guys for all the info. I'm going to see the club secretary on Friday but so far I've found out that it's not the projector, my mistake there, but the laptop connected to it that's the problem as it's running windows. Once I find out which software they are using it should be possible to figure out some sort of solution.The thing about the exe file is due to the programmes which were recommended to create the slide show, from memory one was called pro gold and the other pictures to exe, neither of which run on Linux as far as I know.
I have got an old laptop, but it can only run Mint 14, but as long as it can run Impress then Rich's idea about taking it down the club could be a winner, if I can talk them into letting me use it.
Once I get some more info on this I will post all the details, and thanks for all the help so far.

I know PicturesToExe from old and it is an excellent Windows slideshow maker. I have not checked current price but was 'not cheap'

Since the hardware is windows based look at

http://portableapps.com/apps/office/lib ... e_portable

the whole thing including your impress presentation should go on a memory stick.

If possible do a dry run, I have seen some great screw-ups in the past. (A powerpoint presentation on a floppy disk, except nothing there, it was only a windows shortcut.)

best of luck

It looks like either using your laptop or running LibreOffice Impress from a USB drive is your best bets. I hope all goes well.
I would suggest you grab the free PDF, Impress Guide 4.0 (presentations) (264 pages), check Chapter 9: Slide Shows and Chapter 10: Printing, E-mailing, Exporting, and Saving Slide Shows.

Just thought I'd update this in case anyone wants to try a similar approach to running an AV show.
I was going to use my old laptop to run the show on, it had Mint 14 installed, so I bought a couple of Gigs of memory for it, installed the memory and the laptop promptly died, hard drive failure as far as I can tell, Couldn't die before I bought the memory Anyway, I binned the laptop, it was twelve years old, and decided the run the AV show via a USB stick. I installed the portable version of Libre Office on the USB and it worked a charm when it was plugged into the camera club's laptop, I think it runs windows 7 or something similar.
So basically the AV show was put together using only Linux software and it was only for the presentation that a compromise had to be reach.
All in all quite a successful experiment in the end.