MagicQ Problems with Apple Macs

[TomHoward]

Can anybody comment on the stability of the Linux version compared to Windows? We were thinking of building a MagicQ setup using a Mac Mini but that doesn't seem the best idea now - perhaps a small Asus machine with Linux.

[themadhippy]

Can anybody comment on the stability of the Linux version compared to Windows

It works,it aint crashed or fallen over in any way in a good few years of use.also unlike windows,not sure about apples,the entire operating system is open source so you can strip out all the unnecessary bits making a lean mean lighting machine.If your thinking of buying a machine just for magic q why not look at an all in one pc with touch screen,something like http://cpc.farnell.com/acer/pw-sf5e2-050/pc-aio-22-acer-aspire-z3731/dp/SB0455704?Ntt=sb0455704 would do rather nicely.If moneys tight magic q on linux runs fine on an old dell 800mhz pentium something or other,so no need for anything ultra modern

[TomHoward]

Which Linux distribution are you using? We've got a couple of old Sony Vaio laptops, around 1ghz but rock solid hardware, but was thinking of getting an all in one touch as well

[themadhippy]

ubuntu

[timd]

If you're willing to spend a bit of time getting it working, Arch is very good. You build the installation up from nothing rather than down from everything so you only ever get what you want. Installation requires a significant length of time at the command line however, which may not be ideal for some.

 

Tim

[dirkenstein]

How's touchscreen support in X11 on various Linux distros these days?

 

I gave up using Ubuntu for MagicQ about two years ago because I couldn't determine a way of getting a combination of touchscreen and multi-monitor support working without crashing the X server regularly. To fix it myself, I would have needed to debug and rebuild the X server from source which was a sufficiently painful undertaking at the time to make it a very unattractive option.

 

The problem was that the system didn't seem to be able to cope with a mixture of touchscreens and non-touchscreens. Moving the mouse onto a screen without touch support caused immediate crashes.

 

This was both on a very old Fujitsu tablet (with a rather obscure serial touchscreen driver, fpit) and a more mainstream, Chinese manufactured resistive touch overlay with relatively good Linux support (TouchKit, I think). In either case, I was trying to use a secondary 15-inch, 1024x768 LCD monitor without touchscreen as the outputs display. Multi-monitor worked OK. Touchscreen worked OK, in the Fujitsu case after some custom setserial bashing and banishment of some serial Braille reader software, with some restrictions on calibration ability. Combine both, boom, unusable.

 

It looks like in later systems the default result of multimonitor and touch screen is that the touch input maps to the overall screen surface, not to the individual screens. There's an XInputCoordinateTransform entry for XF86Config that looks like it can fix it, but I doubt it plays nicely out of the box. I also despair of anybody other than a graphics weenie thinking a 3x3 affine matrix transform is a sensible way to configure input information. Requiring A-level coordinate geometry as a minimum standard to configure something is simultaneously both comical and rude.

[CharleyN]

Had these issues on 15"MBP running 10.6.8, using Magic Q ver 1.5.4.0

 

This fixed it for me.

 

FIRST

Right click (two fingers down and click) on Magic Q Application and select OPEN WITH-ALL APPLICATIONS-X11

 

NEXT

 

 

LAUNCH X11-Then (simultaneously) press OPTION-COMMAND-A, when X11 closes look to top of screen and select X11-PREFERENCES-OUTPUT-un-check FULL SCREEN

 

NEXT

 

Place the Magic Q icon on your dashboard.

 

FINALLY

 

LAUNCH Magic Q

.

Magic Q should launch with X11 and you should be able to close it out by simply clicking on the red button to close that window--of course after saving your show and quitting Magic Q app or not.