Redshift

It’s been a long time since I’ve had so much trouble getting something so seemingly simple to work in Linux. I’m documenting this because it’s ridiculous how much effort I’ve put in to trying to fix this stupid problem. A few months ago redshift which adjusts the color temperature of your monitor just stopped working. This stopped your monitor from blaring white screens at you after it gets dark. I’m frequently up at 3 or 4 or 5AM and redshift was a nice adjustment. It’s not nice to become snow blind at those hours. I remember looking at the problem briefly (perhaps a little more than briefly) back then before finally just giving up. I’m getting Period: Unknown. So it doesn’t know what part of the day it is. So it’s not adjusting anything! So today I uninstalled/reinstalled the program and that didn’t work. So I…

sudo apt-get remove --purge redshift

and reinstalled, and that didn’t work either.

So back to googling and I found…

The cause looks to be that Redshift by default automatically determines its location using the geoclue library which in turn uses the Mozilla Location Service. That service has been shut down last week on June 12.

Hopefully Redshift can be patched to work without this. For right now the solution is to manually specify a location in Redshift, so that it doesn’t need to use that service. For that you need the latitude and longitude of your location. Here’s an example how to manually specify the location: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Redshi … n_manually

Great… I saved location info in a astronomy document for when I need to define my location in astronomy programs. I’ll get location info from there. Knowing me I simply called it astronomy.txt. Except I couldn’t find it where I expected it to be, or on any backup USB drives where I keep important data.

I do all kind of searches for astronomy with no luck. I grep (that’s a whole other story) the content’s of text files for Latitude or Longitude…nothing.

OK, I’ll look in my astronomy program for the location info. Except I can’t remember the name. My brain cells are definitely not working good tonight. Is it early stage Alzheimer’s? I’m not joking about this, if it’s going to affect me it’s got to start sometimes. However in general my memory has never been great.

OK, I’ll type astronomy in my log file search to see if I can find it. It only brings up Celestia, which I don’t believe uses location data. Celestia is a big picture program. And it hasn’t worked in Mint for years anyway.

I definitely spent more time searching for this file that I know I had somewhere… than I should have.

OK, I’ll type astronomy in my package manager. It brings up some programs but none of them are what I’m looking for.

So now I google linux astronomy programs, and finally find Stellarium which is what I was looking for but couldn’t remember. It’s installed on my computer and it has my location info.

Except it’s in degrees,minutes,seconds. and the config file is expecting it in decimal. Now I could have just used a converter. But nooooo I have to try and find it using GPS. Except my compass on my phone also shows it in degrees,minutes,seconds.

Finally googling my location using the phones GPS gives me the data in decimal.

So the info here says to create a file called ~/.config/redshift/redshift.conf and shows you what needs to be in that file. So I do that and restart redshift and…

It’s still not working… Unbelievable!

I total reboot… same thing! When I exit, it tells me Trying location provider geoclue2

It’s not supposed to be Trying location provider geoclue2 it’s supposed to be reading the location info from the config file. I double check the path and config file name and they are correct.

I can build a Linux kernel… but I can’t get redshift working. Unbelievable!