Has anyone succesfully run EGON animator for puppy?

[ArthurDent]

I am looking for a lightweight graphical tool to edit Magicpoint files, which the SIAG website claims egon can do. I personaly love magicpoint, but I think the markup would be a bit over my girlfriend's head.

I would install something like Koffice, but the machine is rather limited on ram and cpu power ( thinkpad 380Z 64MB) and though it may run, I fear an unexceptably slow speed.

Every bin of Egon that I have found seg faults when I try to run it ( PW SIAG Xfiler Gvu and Xedplus all work flawlessly from the slackware packages, with the additional required libs).

Does anyone have a working copy, or an alternative program?

She is currently running NOP 3.1 and loving it, this is what is keeping her from her puppy Nihrvanna

Thanks in advance

[ArthurDent]

Ok, an appology: The most recent slackware package that i downloaded did not work, but the slackware package off of the SIAG website did (I can re-pack it as a dotpet with the required libs if anyone is interested).

It turns out that the when I tried to install the official SIAG package it was installed to a different place than the one from the Slackware repository, and the broken one was not getting written over.

I removed the broken one, ran egon (and all the rest of the apps) from the terminal and everything seems to work, now i just have to figure out if the program is going to be usable enough for her.

I am still open to sugestions, if anyone knows of a good presentation graphical presentation program to use on such an old machine.

If nothing else, I can teach her the markup for magicpoint ... (I relaly hope it doesn't come to that.)

Anyway, sorry for wasting your time, and if you want the dotpet i can post it here.

[muggins]

Hi Arthur,

After your initial post, I had a bit of a look yesterday, but never got around to posting back. On this page:

http://siag.nu/online-docs/egon/fileformats.html

it says:

Magic Point
Presentations created for the Magic Point program can be read.

So it seems that you won't be able to edit the mpoint files. I suppose Open Office Impress is too heavy for you? I have seen a couple of apps to create slideshow presentations using pdfs.

Lobster had a html presenter, Apres, here.

[ArthurDent]

Oh, that does put a damper on things. Yes OpenOffice is a tad on the heavy side for the computer she has, I have used it, and with patince it can work (version 1.x) but i doubt i can coax that kind of patince from her.

I will look into Apres.
*edit* Apres seems to be little more than a sequential image viewer (I guess thats all a slideshow is at heart), That is an approach I had not considered, Inkscape ( or Inklite for that matter) would make a viable alternative. I will give this some thought. Thank you!

I used s5 for a little while, it is a java script based presentation program (do you call that a program), but still no GUI which means it will probably be to daughnting for her.

It's not that she is incapable of editing files by hand ( like you owuld for magicpoint or S5) she just doesnt want to learn how to do it. I tried to teach her to code in HTML one day... we installed Amaya the next day.

I have heard of using PDFs or PS files, usualy they are created in LaTeX... and i have never used TeX before, but looking at the sample code ... Well it is code after all, and that defeats our purpose.



I have learned a little from this experince, I learned that I can't stand Xfiler, and that SIAG is just a bit confusing as a spreadsheet app ( the last one i used for any amount of time was VisiCalc, It's a long story).

Thank you for your quick feedback, and all the assitance that i can get

[Aitch]

Hi ArthurDent

Have you tried Teenpup2008?

I know John Biles the creator has put a lot of graphic/music handling software in his puplet, and it's based on the very stable 2.14

try it here:-

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26878


Aitch

[muggins]

Here's some possible alternatives:

http://keyjnote.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_%28LaTeX%29
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 24&t=23332
http://axpoint.axkit.org/
https://huckster.dev.java.net/
http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/LinuxPresentations.html
http://pyntor.coolprojects.org/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pointless/

And lastly, two tcl based apps, which have .pets for pre-pup4 pupversions:

http://www.tinycobol.org/slidedraw.html
http://www.ntlug.org/~ccox/impress/

[muggins]

A few more:

http://prosper.sourceforge.net/
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/%7Ecottrell/xdvi/
http://slidemaker.sourceforge.net/

[amigo]

Seeing this thread got me interested in siag again. I've had packages around of it for a long time, but I had never tried the egon application. Turns out that almost nobody ever had it working.
The Slackware package from the siag site is version 3.5.5 which is not to be found anywhere else. I found recent packages and build scripts from vector linux(siag-3.6.1), but they leave out egon -since it segfaults.
I looked around for all the versions and pacthes I could find -including rpm and debian/fink builds. I finally found one version which would successfully build and where egon would run -version 3.4.10 which I found in a Mandrake rpm.
All the 3.5.x versions I tried to build would not compile, the 3.6.0 and 3.6.1 versions build okay (even egon), but egon segfaults.

The code was highly modified starting with 3.5.0 and egon never got fixed -some things were added and others taken out.
The upshot is that I am working on putting together a nice package with all the goodies -there is even a gtk frontend for siag which works, though it needs a bit of work to remove runtime errors.

I am incorporating some of the extra programs which were included in later versions, like o3read which converts OpenOffice documents.
One nice thing about the older version is that it doesn't use any of the extra libs required for later versions -instead of using Mowitz and neXtaw it has the libs included in the tarball which are included statically.

I am also incorporating a few changes from some pacthes I have found. When I get the thing stabilized a bit, I'll start tracking down some of the changes in the later versions -I mean the ones which don't break the programs. There seem to have been only a few bugfix changes -most of the changes only served to break the programs and fragment/consolidate the sources. It may be that egon is segfaulting because of missing fonts. I have tried running strace on it, but haven't made that much sense out of it. That's why I finally turned back to an earlier version and will work up from there.

I'll try to have a package up in a few days. It's really too bad that these lightweight programs don't get enough attention to really make them competitive with the super-bloat stuff from gnome/KDE/OO.

[ArthurDent]

Amazed to see such a powerful response, it will take me some time to sor through all of the apps you listed ( although i belive i have looked over many of them before).

I have not tried teen pup, for fear of a lack of resources, do you think it would be useable on the target machine?

I'm sure KDE (teenpup runs kde, right?) would be slightly more familiar than the mac-like theme I gave her initially using XFCE. i will burn a teenpup iso tonight and test away.

I, too, would love to see SIAG as a more develpoed package, I feel it need not be 100% MS compatible to be useful, i use PW more than Abiword by far. (then again i use Magicpoint more than powerpoint or Impress ... and Visicalc more than excel, siag, gnumeric et al. so my judgement may be a little scewed.)

I have been playing with Egon, because i thought it would be a shame to waist all the work i put into getting it to run. And although the application may be useful, it is far from usable. after reading the documentation and zorking around the the controls I am still unable to figure out how to make it do ... Well, Anything.

The Impress package linked bellow has always struck me as an interesting project, sadly the last time i used it the font quality was poor(that was almost two years ago, so things may have changed).

It seems to be the common fate of presentation programs to choke before they mature enough to be useful.

I am tempted to give her DOSBOX and neobook ( a sharware dos presentation app) but that kind of defeats the whole open source mentality.

Hopefully one of the programs above will suite my needs, or even better, i will stumble across a graphical program that saves to magicpoint files (i know it's doubtfull, i've been looking for a few weeks now).

In the meantime, thanks for the help, and the search contenues.

[Aitch]

Hopefully one of the programs above will suite my needs, or even better, i will stumble across a graphical program that saves to magicpoint files (i know it's doubtfull, i've been looking for a few weeks now).

Hi Arthur,

Try pm'ing John Biles - he loves a challenge, & if it's not in Teenpup2008,
I'm sure he'll get it working & add it as a pet or something

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/privmsg.ph ... ost&u=3568

[Don't mean to create work for you John, honest, I just thought, after decorating your thread a bit..... ]

Aitch

[muggins]

Regarding presentations, there's that snide comment that those that can't do, teach. I'd like to add that those that can't teach, powerpoint!

[ArthurDent]

those that can't teach, powerpoint!

Well, i have had classes where that was the case. But I feel that presentation software ( when used properly) can really bring everything together, esp. for visual learners (which means most people in general).

Thanks for a good laugh

maybe you should add

Power corupts, Powerpoint corupts absolutly

[Aitch]

Puppy Linux, The Linux for Hoopy Froods

Yay, Towel Day Anniversary; 25th May!!!

http://www.mosquitopost.net/article.cfm?blog_id=13733


Ford Prefects Rule!!

Aitch

[ArthurDent]

ACK! I almost forgot! I must go get my towel! ( I know where it is, of course)

Before this gets to far off topic, I did contact the relevent people as per sugestion.

I have downloaded teenpup but have not had the time to burn it or boot it yet. (I have been looking to buy an eeePC, which i'm sure will give me an all new set of solutions to discover).

Anyway, thanks for the help, and for making a hitchiker feel welcome.

[muggins]

Arthur,

if you're still looking for a possible alternative to Magicpoint, you might want to try the SDL based Multitalk.

[ArthurDent]

thanks i'm checking it out now

[ArthurDent]

looks interesting, i might try it for myself, but i think scripting is to much for her.

on a related note, can beamer class latex slides be done from LyX?

[muggins]

I've never used. But have you seen this thread:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23332?