Biboroku

Installing F.lux on Debian Squeeze

Written by Taro Sato on . Tagged: sysadmin Linux

In another feeble attempt to become a “morning person,” I’ve decided to follow the usual advice that I should not be looking at bright LCD screen at night to help myself going into the “sleep mode.”

Hence F.lux.

I want it to launch automatically at the start of a KDE session.

First of all, check the geographical coordinates of your location, perhaps using a search engine like this one. In my case (Halifax, Canada), the latitude and longitude is 44.65 and -63.6 (in degrees).

Download the Linux binary (i.e., the command-line version) from here. As of now, this is just a binary and no source codes. So no compiling is necessary. Do as:

$ wget http://secure.herf.org/flux/xflux.tgz
$ tar -xvzf xflux.tgz
$ sudo cp xflux /usr/local/bin
$ sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/xflux

Now the command xflux is available system-wide.

To make it run at the KDE starup, create a shell script (called here xflux.sh) like this one:

#!/bin/sh
xflux -l 44.65 -g -63.6

Either place this script manually under ~/.kde/Autostart, or go to KDE menu -> Computer -> System Settings -> Advanced -> Autostart, and add the xflux.sh script there.

If for some reason you need to stop this program, do:

$ kill -9 `pgrep xflux`

Running F.lux on 64-bit Debian Squeeze

I may have problem getting xflux to run at all on a 64-bit machine, possibly seeing a xflux: No such file or directory error. The xflux binary is built against 32-bit libraries:

$ file xflux
xflux: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV),
dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, not stripped

so if I haven’t done so, I need to install 32-bit environment:

$ sudo aptitude install ia32-libs

After this, I should be able to run xflux without problems.

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