Raspberry Pi 4B 4G to visualize a heavy LibreOffice presentation

General Discussion
1

Hi all.
I installed DietPi into a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with 4GB of ram and a microsd, using LXDE.
I want to use it to display a LibreOffice presentation (a heavy one) on a projector.

I cannot find LibreOffice in the list of optimized software, so I suppose that the rpi is not powerful enough.

I installed it via apt install libreoffice-impress. The performance is not really good, but enough as a start point.

My question is, is there another option or software to visualize presentations in DietPi? Of course, I’m not going to edit the file in the RPI, only visualize it.

Any idea or alternative way to do it is really welcome!

2

This has nothing to do with power of an SBC, we simply did not implement LibreOffice as software option yet. :wink:

However, we are thinking to have it included in future. As long as this is not available, we created a small blog post on how to create a desktop environment (incl. LibreOffice) Install a DietPi desktop system in a few steps – DietPi Blog

But you are fine if you can show/share the presentation already.

3

Thanks for your reply.
My idea is not to prepare a Desktop environment. It is only to use as an interactive PPT/Impress presentation, and the apt install libreoffice-impress is installing all that I need.

But looks like the file to visualize is too heavy, so I’m looking for alternatives to Libreoffice or other options.

4

Not sure if Libreoffice is the issue. It might be the performance of a SBC in generall. Have a look to resource consumption using htop while running the presentation. This should indicate CPU as well as memory usage.

5

You did install standalone X11 then and enabled KMS + raised GPU memory?

6

I overclocked but maybe is better if I remove LXDE. Anyway, looks like the problem is not about the RPi performance because the CPU is mainly idle and memory is not even 50% used. I think that the problem is reading the document. I tested it from a USB3 pendrive and from the microSD. Better result from the USB3.

When I say a heavy libreoffice file, I’m talking about more than 1K slides full of images and animations. Crazy stuff.

I’m surprised because the RPi is handling it better than I expected.

7

WTF, never have seen such a presentation. :scream:

8

Yeah. Exactly 1240 slides. Insane. But the RPi + DietPi is able to handle it. Not without troubles, but it is able.

Loading the file into LibreOffice takes a few minutes, but after that, it works.

But this is not a solution. Maybe it would be a way to translate Libreoffice to HTML or another better format.

BTW, this is a favor that I’m doing to my brother-in-law. He told me, I want to run a PPT automatically. I never thought that the PPT was 1K slides one. In fact, I have never seen something like this before.

9

openoffice maybe

or

Calligra Stage

They may be just as resource intensive as Libre though

XFCE is another lightweight desktop that might help

10

The main problem was installing the OS in the microsd. Even the U3 is too slow for my case.
So XFCE + USB3 is fine.

BTW I did not know that the rpi4 was able to boot from the USB. :heart_eyes:

Now I have another problem. The sound is not working, but this is for another thread.

Thanks to everybody for your support.

11

Yes this should be working ootb on RPi4 models.

1 Like
12

Oh yeah…in fact there is a SATA adapter and/or a NVME to SATA adapters out there that allow booting from a VERY fast SSD or NVME…crazy fast boot

I splurged a while back then the 4B came out and snagged and 8 gig before they poofed away and a DeskPi Pro case…installed it to an SSD and it boots remarkably fast!

Amazon.com : raspberry pi ssd expansion board

However a decent speed USB drive should be quite faster than the SD card.

pi-4-microsd-vs-usb-3-ssd
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Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison - 2019 | Jeff Geerling