Hi People,
Last weekend I had to use my big laptop, from which I usually run QLC+, to play some video clips during a show. So I moved all my show files over to my old eeePC-704 and ran QLC+ from there. 512Mb memory with a 600MHz CPU. 3 USB ports for my DMXKing interface, Alias-8 Midi Controller, and a Logitech wireless trackball - because I hate mousepads!
It all ran perfectly smoothly during the show, but there were problems editing.
I initially had problems with each editing page wanting to be much wider than the screen allowed, and had to set the "Simple Desk" to only 12 sliders. But switching to "Full Screen" mode brought better control.
The screen size is 800x480 pixels which allows a non scrolling Virtual Console size of 750x398 in full Screen mode. During VC GUI editing, the top "ToolBar" extends past the right hand end of the screen, with a gadget that allows access to the last few icons as a drop down list. This worked fine.
But the "Functions" page had a problem. When editing a scene, the "toolbar" above the fixture sliders also overran the width of the screen, but the "extension" gadget didn't allow access to the 2 text fields off the edge, the "Clone this step into this Chaser" and the actual "Scene Name" text gadgets. Not having access to the "Scene Name" made editing new scenes impossible. I ended up creating a matching "small" VC and doing the "function" editing on the larger laptop, copying the show files back and forth.
Personally I would prefer that the whole scene editing area was left as wide as its toolbar and a scroll bar for the visible area added if needed for a small screen.
I noticed one other thing while trying to squeeze 5 frames and a cuelist into the much reduced VC. I "stacked" several frames one above the other in collapsed mode, and put the cuelist across the bottom half of the VC. When a frame is collapsed, the width of the "header" reduces to a fixed value, rather than staying the same width as the frame itself. You can drag the collapsed header back out to the width of the frame, but this is not remembered when you expand/collapse again.
Before I decided to use the eeePC, I tried with a much older XP laptop. It has a wierd graphics card which boots correctly from a "Live" system, but, once the same system is "installed", will only boot with the top left 640x480 of a 1024x768 screen active. I fought with this for a day before giving up.
But I managed to create a fully functional Lubuntu QLC+ system on an 8Gb "Live" USB memory stick with "persistence" enabled. That ran full screen, but in the end I decided not to trust that laptop for a show, and use the eeePC.
All systems are running Lubuntu 13.10, 64 and 32 bit versions.
Regards,
Chris.
Q Light Controller+
Official forums of the QLC+ project