MagicQ stability?

[ptechie]

I design the lights for a local church for their musical they do once a year. They have a small collection of conventional lights and pipe mounted (DMX) dimmers and they suppliment with approximatley $800 in rental equipment. They own a small Elation board, but last year I had them rent an ETC Express and they will never go back. As this is a once a year event it doesn't make sense to invest a lot of money in a console. To save money this year I started looking into MagicQ. I have installed a clean dual booting instance of Lubuntu (Ubuntu with a lightweight windows environment) just for MagicQ. I have a MagicDMX (5 hour limited adapter) on they way.
Can I trust this set up for my shows? I have sat behind Colortran, ETC, and Strand desks for more hours then I can count and can't remember anytime the console caused a problem in a show or rehearsal. However PCs have hiccups almost daily it seems. I know some of you run MagicQ so I just need some reassurance that I won't disappoint the kids with failing lighting.

More backstory: This is mostly a activity/social event for the youth group. The entire technical staff is volunteer including myself. This is my second year designing after taking over from the musical director who was doing double duty.

[Esoteric]

I have had Colortran, ETC, Flying Pig, Grand MA, Strand, etc desks die on me before. No desk is immune.

That being said, with MagicQ on a stable OS as the only software on the machine, I have only had a crash once. And that was when I tried to alter a fixture profile WHILE THE SHOW WAS IN PROGRESS. DO NOT DO THAT. *lol*

Other than that it is just as stable as any other desk.

[petereit]

I'm not familiar with Lubuntu. Is it a Windows emulator? Or are you running a licensed copy of Windows in a supported configuration? My personal rule is to never trust a Windows machine in a production. An additional layer of potential fail points on top of Windows makes me even more uneasy.

[Esoteric]

Petereit, that is interesting. Windows 7 is probably the most stable OS available right now. I know a dedicated machine is always best, but I have had about equal failure rates between dedicated consoles and Windows based machines.

However, yes I would not add another layer of possible failures. My advice will be to always use a licensed copy of Windows 7 (or MacOS) for any mission critical uses.

[cw4u]

I ran MagicQ on Windows 7 for a couple months. No issues at all.

[ptechie]

Lubuntu is a Linux Ubuntu derivative. It doesn't have all the flashy OS effects so it is lighter on the processor. More overhead for MagicQ. I have licenses for both 7 and XP, but have never used 7. The only downside to the Linux or Mac versions is that they only support one monitor of display. Do you know if you can view both a cue stack and the channel intensities on a single screen? What about input do you use a touch screen or special keyboard? Do those ever cause problems?

[Esoteric]

I use touchscreens all the time with mine with no issues. I also use my PC wing with no problem. MagicQ uses very little overhead.

[waynehoskins]

My usual go-to computer for MagicQ/PC is a little netbook. Basic, nothing fancy, I believe it has a 1 Ghz Atom chip, no extra memory, Windows 7 Starter. It just works. Except for the rare occasion I do something stupid to it, it's rock solid. I don't use MagicQ frequently, but I am doing a gig with it this weekend with Mike's PC wing (very nice, highly recommended, much better than trying to fire playbacks from the computer keyboard and operating the playback faders with the mouse).

I do so have to buy a touchscreen sometime (or I've also considered a touchscreen all-in-one like the Asus eeeTouch).

I do wish fixture profiles were easier to come by. There is a rather extensive built-in library for many of the "more reputable" fixtures, but for the lower-end fixtures you just about have to build your own or get them from someone else. That's the stupid thing I did this time that made it crash, trying to drop-in another complete library. Either it got clobbered by the email gremlins or I did it wrong, so I rolled it back and modified two "generic" profiles to make the two I needed, which I got pretty close but not quite.

[Esoteric]

Yeah, I hear you on profiles Wayne. I guess once I figured out how to create my own (not too difficult) it wasn't that big of a deal.

Yeah, the all in ones are cool. Or if you could find a touch screen overlay for a laptop that you like and actually works would be cool too.