Plasma screen trade show presentation system under Linux

Regardless of the product or service that one may sell at a trade show, a plasma display is a powerful marketing tool. The impressive rich colored wide plasma display will generate interest in both your product and in the setup itself. Having the plasma display alongside your printed material, samples, and the sales staff maximizes the marketing effect. Thus, your product or service will get the exposure it deserves, and you will be taking full advantage of your presence at the trade show.

Having a plasma screen presentation system powered by Linux has many advantages. Although, wireless access is becoming more and more available these days, it is very expensive and may not offer enough bandwidth for graphic rich content. The fact that your browser will communicate with an internal IP address will allow you to present your web site to potential clients at lightning fast speed. Also, you will

be able to change and make modifications to your web site locally, in case the need arises.

While showing off your web site to a captive audience will do a lot of good, displaying a browser window with the same unchanged content will bore the visitors and yourself. A presentation powered by Linux will allow you to minimize the browser window when you are not browsing the

web site and run a less intensive, but more graphic sort of presentation (You may run a graphic rich StarOffice presentation for example). You

will be able to start such presentations manually, or have the cron daemon execute the presentations for you at predetermined intervals (Every 45 minutes to an hour, for example).

If you are highly prepared and have a presentation that lasts over 30 minutes, then you are ready for the show. However, most presentations last 15 minutes or less, and expensive equipment sits idle between showings. Do not worry! There is a great open source utility that will make sure that your machine works as hard at this trade show as you do.

With many thanks to the talented programer Stefan Ondrejicka, a utility called CHBG, which stands for Change Background, will run a slide-show-like presentation on your desktop during the entire duration of the trade show day. That's right! This little 300 kilobyte marvel will push your collection of images in a periodic order onto your KDE,

or in our instance Gnome, desktop background.

The CHBG slide show is highly configurable. Duration and changing effects may be set, and you can customize your heart out with this utility. Thus, you will be able to implement an intense graphic presentation. Your industry-related slide show will periodically change images, say every minute, five minutes, or in our graphic arts business, every 15 seconds. During your slide presentation, minimized browser windows and various other desktop shortcuts will be readily available for startup. You may begin showing off your web site or logging client information at any time.

Presenting your product or service at it's best is the main objective of this high tech setup, and the reason for being at the trade show in the first place. Now, your expensive equipment is thoroughly employed and put to hard work, and your product gets the spotlight. Trade show attendees line up to look at your product or service, eager to become

your customers.

Well maybe not [:)] Hopefully that is the case, and you're selling your wonder product and you're getting dozens and millions of new customers.

However, lets be realistic. This is probably not the case.

Visitors to your booth will have various objectives. Some may see the plasma display and want to purchase your product or service. Hey, you're a winner! Many visitors to your booth will simply be attracted to the technology. Trade show attendees who will not pay attention to either your product, service or setup are beyond the scope of this article [:)]

This brings us to the second purpose of your high tech plasma display setup. By using Linux, an open source software in your setup, you are

promoting open source software and, adding your contribution to the open source movement. Your live, personal example will hopefully win the

hearts of potential users and bring them into the open source camp.

If time permits, and you don't have a potential client asking questions about your main product or service, why not talk to the person who's purely interested in the technology of your setup? Tell them about the open source of the software running this wondrous presentation of yours. Show them several features of your web site and then switch to the slide show. Tell them about the programing involved, and how this software works. Best of all, tell them the software is open source and most probably is free! Mention the numerous enthusiasts the world over who produce the software that's running your great presentation. Tell about the entire functional copy of your database, and how this copy of your relational database runs locally.

On the other hand, you may not have the time to talk about technology. Instead, why not have a little printout, say a printout of this article, that you can hand out once you realize a person is interested in the setup. Also, include a business card . Thus, you will serve the commercial purpose of being in the trade show and lend a hand to the open source movement!

The rest of this article will be devoted to the technical details of the system setup. The system may consist of either a laptop or a stationary

machine with enough hard disk space to store your entire web site (or at least the front end of it). If you don't have enough memory, then you may leave just enough space to keep the presentation and slide show images.

Choose the Linux distribution of your preference, like Red Hat, Suse,Debian, basically any Unix-like or BSD software that will run the X Window system and will also allow running of the Apache web server. Configuration of the system and your window manager are beyond the scope of this article.

Since you most likely do not own a plasma wide-screen display, you will need to rent one. You can begin configuring your system with a simple monitor. After you've downloaded your web sites, your configuration files, and you've made sure your system and the Apache server is running

on the machine you intend to take to the trade show, it is time to go out and get the plasma display. You will need it to create a mock

setup, and and so you can begin to configure the X Window system. You will need to make certain your video card has enough video RAM (16 Mega

Bytes is efficient, 32 is better, and if you plan to run an intensive graphics presentation, 64 Mega Bytes will be plenty).

Now that your system is up and running, make a backup of the Xfreeconfig file and plug in the plasma monitor. In our example, we are using an

NEC PlasmaSync 4205W monitor. Due to financial constraints, this is not the top of the line, and is slightly outdated. As a distribution, Redhat 7.3 was used.

After making the backup copy, we ran the Xconfigurator. The Xconfigurator did not have our particular model of monitor, but because

we had sufficient documentation we chose to do a custom monitor installation. We plugged in the proper horizontal and vertical frequencies, chose the no clock chip set, and after experimenting with

several resolution settings, we came up with the Macintosh settings of 6 of 836 by 642 pixel resolution for our plasma presentation system. The

X window system started up perfectly with just a slight margin of pixels, creating a black frame around the main window. Again, if your budget allows, you may choose a more modern plasma display, thus eliminating this problem.

After installing the monitor, we began configuring our window manager. We were using Gnome. After placing all the shortcuts on the desktop, we

started configuring the CHBG utility. Because of the nature of our business, we had plenty of artwork to show off, so we decided to use 1920 different images for our slide show, which would alternate every 15 seconds throughout the three day trade show. Of course you may choose an entirely different approach.

The main purpose of our setup is presentational, so we did not worry as much about data gathering or order processing. This subject is beyond the scope of this article, however it is entirely possible to log orders into MySQL or the database of your choice, restoring it to your mainframe RDBMS after the show. Thus, your sysem may also serve as a sales and contact logging station.

Before we ventured out, the system was thoroughly tested.

Multiple copies of this article were printed out, to give to people interested in the marvel of open source software.

Paul Tyutin @ sunbirds.com/support

PLASMA SCREEN PRESENTATION

SYSTEM under LINUX