Setting up redshift

I revived my old Lenovo Miix 310 yesterday. It’s not a great machine by any stretch, but it at least fills a niche similar to the one netbooks used to play for me: it’s small, low-power, and can be thrown in a bag. The top row of the detachable keyboard is awkwardly shifted over (making tying numbers and some punctuation awkward), and the touchpad is weirdly sensitive. However, I did get it to work just fine, albeit with some tweaking.

For some reason I’d been under the impression that the machine had become mostly unusable after an upgrade gone wrong, but I suspect I was just mixing that up with a different laptop. I picked it up to see if I could wipe it and reinstall something like Manjaro on it, but it booted up just fine! I got it upgraded from Xubuntu Focal (20.04) through to Xubuntu Noble (24.04), stripped the installed packages down as far as I sensibly could, including replacing xubuntu-desktop with xubuntu-desktop-minimal. So far, it’s been working fine.

One thing I wanted to set up was dimming at nighttime to help save my eyes and to help with sleep, but Xubuntu doesn’t install anything for that, so I had to do some digging, and recalled redshift. It has a GTK frontend that can function as an indicator, but it crashed for me. I ran it manually, and there were some issues with the GeoClue2 service, which appears to be installed but isn’t functioning as expected for me. I figured the next best thing would be to spin it up as a systemd user service.

I dropped the following configuration file at ~/.config/redshift.conf:

[redshift]
temp-day=5700
temp-night=3600
gamma=0.8
adjustment-method=randr
location-provider=manual

[manual]
lat=53.35
lon=-6.26

I make no secret of the fact that I live in Dublin, so giving away its approximate position on the globe isn’t too big a deal! The main things I had to set there were adjustment-method=randr as XFCE on this machine doesn’t support Wayland as yet, and location-provider=manual to prevent it from querying GeoClue2.

Next up was configuring the user service. I dropped this file as ~/.config/systemd/user/redshift.service, after ensuring the directory existed:

[Unit]
Description=redshift
After=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Environment=DISPLAY=:0
ExecStart=/usr/bin/redshift
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

After that, it was a matter of running:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now redshift

And everything just worked. It’s survived at least one reboot, so I think it should work away by itself from now on.

I stumbled across an alternative to it called xsct. It lacks some of the smarts to toggle things based on when dawn and dusk are and isn’t a daemon, but it probably wouldn’t be too big a deal to write a wrapper service that can do just that and trigger xsct to run as appropriate.