DebConf17/Advice-for-presenters

Feel free to add any tips or advice for presenters at DebConf.

Publishing your slides

Please publish your slides on Debconf-share git annex repository [1] to do that make sure you have your ssh public key published in your Alioth [2] account and then follow the instructions [3]. Alternatively you can email your presentation to [4] and it will be added to the repository (eventually).

Display Output

Our old limitation of 1024x768 and an aspect ration of 4:3 no longer applies for DebConf17. The new baseline resolution is 1280x720, and slides that have a 4:3 aspect ration will be letterboxed – This means, if your presentation is not in our baseline resolution, it will be adjusted between black bars.

For LaTeX/beamer:

 \documentclass[aspectratio=169]{beamer}

Our video capture system uses HDMI. The video team has adaptors to some other formats:

• micro-HDMI
• mini-HDMI
• DVI
• DP
• mini-DP
• USB-C (best-effort, our adaptors are largely untested, and there are several different protocols for video over USB-C)
• VGA (best-effort, via unreliable adapters)

The VGA-to-HDMI adapters are on a best-effort basis. Those are known to be somewhat unreliable and you are encouraged to test your laptop with them prior to your talk, in order to check whether they are an option.

If your laptop doesn't have one of the above mentioned digital ports, it's up to you to bring an adapter and ideally test it before bringing it to DebConf:

Presenters are strongly encouraged to test their setup works correctly with our video equipment before their session, either in one of the video team volunteer training sessions or in breaks between talks — Attempting to fix stuff five minutes before your presentation is not fun!

As a last resort, desktop systems are present as part of the video-team setup, so if you have your talk in PDF format, it can be presented via the desktop system.

xrandr hints

USB-C

Apparently you may need to update your thunderbolt firmware to get video to work. DLange may even have a suitable windows install on a flash drive, to help you.

720p VGA mode

# One of these should work:
xrandr --newmode 720p60 74.25  1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +HSync +VSync
xrandr --newmode 720p60-2 74.25 1280 1392 1448 1650 720 722 728 750

# Substitute the mode that works better appropriately in:
xrandr --addmode VGA-1 720p60
xrandr --output VGA-1 --mode 720p60

Mirroring at non-native LCD resolution

xrandr --output LVDS-1 --scale-from 1280x720 --output HDMI-1 --same-as LVDS-1

Water

If possible, bring something to drink during the talk. There are some water bottles at the speaker's desk if you didn't bring any water yourself.

Templates

Debian presentation templates for various architectures, and an archive of previous talks can be found on the main Debian wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/Presentations