[maemo-developers] External screen display

[From: Graham Cobb]

I have announced on ITT 
(http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19566) a 
proof-of-concept release for supporting an external VGA screen.  It isn't 
ready for general release yet and I could do with some additional development 
help.  

In particular, one of my main goals is to be able to use my Internet Tablet to 
show Powerpoint presentations.  The easiest way to do that seems to be to get 
Powerpoint to save the presentation as a set of image files (e.g. jpegs) and 
create a slideshow viewer which will allow the user to move forwards and 
backwards through the images, go back to the beginning, set up a timed show, 
loop, etc.  A program to display a single image on the external display 
already exists.  So, the slideshow program would be a fairly straightforward 
development in something like python, if I was a python programmer.

There are also other tasks to be done ranging from creating web pages, through 
improving the installation, to rewriting chunks of the X-windows driver to 
optimise updates.

If anyone is interested in helping out with those or contributing to the 
development in any other way please take a look at the garage project 
(https://garage.maemo.org/projects/xsisusb/).  If you are interested in 
actually using the software (even though it is fairly restricted so far) take 
a look at the ITT thread.

Graham

P.S. If anyone wants to know why I am using the slideshow approach rather than 
displaying a PDF, it is because it seems that the sort of (marketing) 
presentations I need to use this for produce extremely complex PDF which 
display programs either just die on or take tens of seconds to show each 
page.  Not useful if you are giving a presentation to an audience.  It seems 
like a good general principle: pre-process as much as possible off-board 
before putting the data on the tablet and keep the tablet's task as simple as 
possible.