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Last edited: Feb. 27, 2016, 1:38 AM EST

I finally found a wonderful free (as in freedom and also price), libre, open source alternative to the non-libre, gratis f.lux screen tinting software.

Despite the name, Redshift actually can tint your screen lots of different colors, not just red!

Redshift is available for GNU/Linux, and "experimental" builds are available for Windows.

I haven't yet tried Redshift in Windows, but, after some fiddling, I did manage to compile Redshift version 1.11 in Lucid Puppy Linux 5.2.8 version 004.

I'm very happy with Redshift so far. My screen with Redshift looks so similar to my screen with f.lux, I'm not sure if there's any visible difference. So, for me, that makes Redshift a perfect replacement for f.lux right out of the box.

Since Redshift does what I want already, I haven't gotten inspired to modify Redshift, but I'm so pleased that it's possible to modify it. Not being able to fix f.lux's various problems was incredibly frustrating.

Redshift not only tints your screen, but lets you decrease your screen's brightness, and also lets you drastically change the color of the tint! And you can shut off the slow color temperature transition.

A GUI (graphical user interface) is available for Redshift, but I haven't tried it because I usually don't like fiddling with the Python programming language. (Most of Redshift is written in the C programming language, but the GUI is written in Python.)

So, the way I run Redshift is via console command lines like these:

./redshift -help

./redshift -t 3200:2500 -l -90:0 -r
Color temperature 3200K during the day, and 2500K during the night. Latitude of the South Pole, longitude 0. -r removes the slow color temperature transitions, so the changes are applied instantaneously.

./redshift -t 3200:2500 -l -90:0 -r -b .5:.5
Same, but half as much screen brightness during both the day and night.

./redshift -l -90:0 -g 1:.1:.1 -r
Instantly changes the RGB (red/green/blue) gamma settings of your screen, setting green and blue to the minimum value Redshift allows.

The rest of this blog post might only be interesting to people having difficulty compiling Redshift from source code. Also, possibly, the below steps might only work for Lucid Puppy Linux 5.2.8 version 004 users.

And I hope I didn't accidentally break anything by making various scripts ignore the fact that I don't have Autoconf >= 2.69 and intltool >= 0.50. But so far, Redshift seems to be working fine for me.

To compile Redshift 1.11 in Lucid Puppy Linux 5.2.8 version 004, I had to run the "bootstrap" script in the redshift-1.11 source code folder by typing:

./bootstrap

That created some needed files, but resulted in these errors:

Then, I had to open the file "configure.ac" in a text editor and simply delete line 4, which said:

AC_PREREQ([2.69])

Then I ran the bootstrap script again:

./bootstrap

This successfully created a "configure" script.

Then, I ran into trouble running the "configure" script, so I had to open the "configure" script in a text editor and comment out lines 11295 through 11307, which say this:

After doing that, I was able to successfully run the "configure" script using this command:

./configure

Then, to build Redshift, all I had to do was type this command:

make

Once it was finished building (in maybe less than 10 seconds on my 3.4 GHz dual core desktop computer), I was able to run Redshift by going into the folder "redshift-1.11/src" and typing commands like the above.

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