"Finally!" I hear you say. And you are right. Because of time-constraints and my wish to include much more than is essential for this tool I delayed and delayed and delayed the public release of wiipresent.

But now I convinced myself to be happy about it :-) At least my TODO list is nicely formatted and complete. And in itself the tool already works very nice. The fact that ct magazine already mentioned wiipresent in their April edition was another motivation to release what works already.

So let me introduce to you: wiipresent v0.7.2, an off-the-shelf tool to use your wiimote for giving presentations on Linux (or control your Linux remotely).

Currently wiipresent can do the following things:

only requires a bluetooth receiver for communication

rumbles to indicate how much time you have left for your presentation

leds indicate how much time has passed/is left for your presentation

has keymaps for tens of presentation applications (evince, xpdf, openoffice, acrobat reader, ...)

also has keymaps for many other applications (multimedia, terminal, browser, ...)

can be used to control your mouse pointer (to start an application, copy files, shutdown, ...)

easy to use buttons for common operations like: switching workspace, switching applications, ...

There are quite a few compelling reasons for using a Wiimote for giving presentations:

the same features as most of the advanced presentation devices

is much cheaper (40 EUR) than those advanced presentation devices (>80 EUR)

has an open and documented interface where some advanced devices do not work in Linux

uses bluetooth which is common on laptops nowadays, but small USB bluetooth receivers are quite cheap (10 EUR)

works very reliably even in a big exhibition hall (LinuxTag 2008) with thousands of people and booths with as many bluetooth devices. We even left the exhbition room and we were still able to control our laptop at the CentOS booth (witness references on request :-))

fancy silicon covers exist in various colors matching your outfit are available from Ebay

at least one person attributes finding a girlfriend by using the wiimote in a public area (name witheld because of privacy concerns)

they come with a wrist-cord (and anti-slip coating) for vivid, animated presenters using lots of gestures

So get it from:

http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/wiipresent/

or look at the wiimote presentation Geerd-Dietger and I did at FrOSCon

Enjoy!