Work has bought me a new machine on which is installed Redhat 9.0. I'm using KDE as my window manager & I can't figure out what KDE's equivalent to a PowerPoint viewer is. Kpresenter is a PowerPoint-like app, but what do I do to be able to double-click on a PPS file and have it display?
There are a few options that I know of:
a) OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) can be used to view and edit PowerPoint presentations. This works well for simple presentations (no fancy animations or esoteric fonts and formatting), and is free. A version with more filters and support is sold by Sun as StarOffice.
b) CodeWeavers (www.codeweavers.com) sells two products, the CrossOver Plugin and CrossOver Office. The CrossOver plugin will let you run the Windows PowerPoint viewer under Linux. CrossOver Office will let you run the entire PowerPoint application, which lets you edit the slides as well as view them. Both work fine for casual use, but I find that running PowerPointXP under CrossOver Office crashes more often than when I run it natively under WinXP. CrossOver Office requires you to have a license to MS Office, an additional expense.
c) Vmware (www.vmware.com) lets you boot a complete Windows operating system under Linux. This is a heavyweight, but robust solution. Last time I used this, it did not interoperate as well with other Linux applications as well as CrossOver does. You have to have both a license to Windows and MS Office for this to work fully.
d) Wine is a free Windows Emulator, and CrossOver is based on this. Last time I tried Wine it was _much_ harder to set up and use than CrossOver.
Chris
-- Chris Colohan Email: chris@xxxxxxxxxx PGP: finger colohan@xxxxxxxxxx Web: www.colohan.com Phone: (412)268-4751
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