Installing redshift in Qubes OS to soothe your eyes at night

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Anyone who’s used a computer screen at night will tell you that blue light hurts your eyes.

Most OSes have a “Night Mode” that will lower the intensity of blue light that your display emits, reducing eye strain at night. Unfortunately, the standard Qubes OS install does not contain anything that will do this.

The standard Fedora repos include a package called redshift that will accomplish this.

  1. In a dom0 terminal, type:
sudo qubes-dom0-update redshift
  1. Get your current latitude and longitude coordinates
  • If you’re concerned about privacy, you can be Santa Claus if you want: 90.0000° N, 135.0000° W (The North Pole)
  • Bear in mind that if you do this, your screen will redshift for six months, and then blueshift for six months :stuck_out_tongue:
  • The redshift command seems to require a value at -l LAT:LON in order to be successful, but you can manually toggle colour-shifting as well.
  1. Complete one of the following steps:
  • For automatic colour-shifting based on your system clock:
redshift -l $latitude:$longitude &
  • For manual “oneshot” colour-shifting:
redshift -l $latitude:$longitude -O $colour_temperature
  • To see what other options redshift can do:
redshift -h

I will write a way to have systemd activate this automatically in a future post.

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used the way attached in the past and was satisfied with…

AUTO Script:
------------

in dom0 terminal:

sudo qubes-dom0-update redshift

for permanent use, a AUTO startup script is needed:

move to .config directory in dom0 terminal:

cd /home/<Username>/.config
nano redshift.conf

during create of: ~/.config/redshift.conf  latitude and longitude of your location also is needed:

 [redshift]
 temp-day=6400
 temp-night=3200
 adjustment-method=randr
 location-provider=manual

 [manual]
 lat=xx.xxxx
 lon=xx.xxxx

Save & close.

create script ~/.startupscripts/redshift.sh and open in dom0 terminal:

mkdir /home/<Username>/.startupscripts

cd .startupscripts

nano redshift.sh

Type:

  #!/bin/sh
  sleep 2
  redshift

Save & close.

In dom0 terminal make file executable:

chmod +x redshift.sh

In dom0 autostart under System tools Session & Startup insert:

Name: Redshift
Description: Blue light filter
Command: sh /home/<Username>/.startupscripts/redshift.sh
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Blue light from devices also undermines the quality of our sleep. Redshift is the only package i’ve manually installed in dom0, for this reason alone, although being softer on the eyes is a good bonus.

An option to include on install would be great… but until that happens, here’s another installation guide:

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