The scenario is simple: You have a kiosk or display machine showing information, eg: a self-updating webpage. On a schedule you want to launch an Impress or PowerPoint presentation on the display which will loop. You want that loop to only run for a few minutes before terminating and going back to what was originally being displayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How do you do this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s cool. Now can we configure it to have a different presentation to run each day?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is quite easy to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now you can schedule your presentations to appear and disappear as required without manually interrupting the normal display on that kiosk. Naturally these instructions can be adapted for other uses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The scenario is simple: You have a kiosk or display machine showing information, eg: a self-updating webpage. On a schedule you want to launch an Impress or PowerPoint presentation on the display which will loop. You want that loop to only run for a few minutes before terminating and going back to what was originally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tutorials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serenux.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Procedure:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/li>$ crontab -e<\/code>
<\/li>00 10 * * * DISPLAY=:0 \/usr\/lib\/libreoffice\/program\/simpress -show \/home\/dashboard\/Documents\/MyPreso.odp --norestore
15 10 * * * \/usr\/bin\/killall soffice.bin<\/code>
What the above lines will do is launch Impress to open your MyPreso presentation in Show Mode at 10:00am on the dot on the first display (screen zero). The \u201c\u2013norestore\u201d parameter prevents LibreOffice from asking if you want to recover any files which will occur if you terminate LibreOffice instead of closing the app as normal (we can\u2019t because it\u2019s a kiosk, remember?). Then, at 10:15am, the LibreOffice task will be terminated, thus ending the looping presentation.
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<\/li>00 10 * * 1 DISPLAY=:0 \/usr\/lib\/libreoffice\/program\/simpress -show \/home\/dashboard\/Documents\/MyMondayPreso.odp --norestore # Monday
00 10 * * 2 DISPLAY=:0 \/usr\/lib\/libreoffice\/program\/simpress -show \/home\/dashboard\/Documents\/MyTuesdayPreso.odp --norestore # Tuesday
00 10 * * 3 DISPLAY=:0 \/usr\/lib\/libreoffice\/program\/simpress -show \/home\/dashboard\/Documents\/MyWednesdayPreso.odp --norestore # Wednesday
00 10 * * 4 DISPLAY=:0 \/usr\/lib\/libreoffice\/program\/simpress -show \/home\/dashboard\/Documents\/MyThusdayPreso.odp --norestore # Thursday
00 10 * * 5 DISPLAY=:0 \/usr\/lib\/libreoffice\/program\/simpress -show \/home\/dashboard\/Documents\/MyFridayPreso.odp --norestore # Friday
15 10 * * * \/usr\/bin\/killall soffice.bin<\/code>
You will notice that each line has one of the asterisks replaced with a number 1 through 5. This tells cron only to run that schedule on the day specified. In this case, the 1 represents Monday, the 2 is Tuesday, the 3 is Wednesday and so forth. Saturday is 6 and Sunday is both 1 or 7.
You may be wondering why we only have one killall command instead of five? We don\u2019t need five as the command to kill LibreOffice is the same each time, so it doesn\u2019t need a day designation \u2013 it will run every day at 10:15am.
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