8 ms·

I just released F.lux for Ubuntu (fades your screens at night)

91 points by kilian 16y ago

frognibble 16y ago
F.lux adjusts the color of your computer's monitor to match the time of day. It's warm at night and like sunlight during the day. I've been using F.lux for a couple of months on OS X. The orange color at night looked a odd to me at first, but now I don't notice it. F.lux can help you sleep better: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/research.html http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/research.html
mwsherman 16y ago
I've been using it for a month or two on Windows and am quite surprised how much I like it.
- farmerbuzz 16y ago
  Flux didn't change the appearance enough for me -- what I really want is to have light text on a dark background at night. One ugly hack is to use the Windows 7 magnifier tool to invert video. The colors are atrocious but you can pretend they are neon lights for night mode ;)
paulsmith 16y ago
A similar program for automatically changing the color temperature, Redshift [1], was recently highlighted by Lifehacker and others as an alternative to the commandline-only XFlux, inspired by F.lux. EDIT: One advantage Redshift has is that it automatically determines your lng/lat based on your current "home" location in the Clock applet. [1]: http://jonls.dk/redshift/ http://jonls.dk/redshift/
- there 16y ago
  redshift is also open source and thus works on other platforms, where f.lux is closed source.
  - jlcgull 16y ago
    f.lux works as advertised. Love it. Use it. Highly recommend it. More so, now that is has nice GUI and all. The fact that it is closed source should not be a problem unless you are RMS!
    - there 16y ago
      The fact that it is closed source should not be a problem unless you are RMS! um, or unless you use an operating system or architecture for which they don't build a binary, so you can't use it no matter how well it works as advertised.
      - jlcgull 16y ago
        Sure. OSS is great and I am a big fan. But which major OS is f.lux not available for, again? Your argument in the present context is exactly what I was referring to when I mentioned RMS! Also, f.lux does work as advertised on the OSs that it is available for. :-)
        nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
        > But which major OS is f.lux not available for, again? FreeBSD > f.lux does work as advertised on the OSs that it is available for.
  - nuxi 16y ago
    It works on other platforms because it's open source? Isn't that a bit of an overstatement? For the fun of it, I just downloaded this and tried to compile on my Linux box: ~/tmp/tmp# uname -a Linux susie 2.6.27.39-0.2-default #1 SMP 2009-11-23 12:57:38 +0100 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux ~/tmp/tmp# cat /etc/SuSE-release openSUSE 11.1 (x86_64) VERSION = 11.1 ~/tmp/tmp# wget http://launchpad.net/redshift/trunk/1.4.1/+download/redshift-1.4.1.tar.bz2 ~/tmp/tmp# tar xf redshift-1.4.1.tar.bz2 ~/tmp/tmp# cd redshift-1.4.1/ ~/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1# ./configure [...] redshift 1.4.1 prefix: /usr/local compiler: gcc -std=gnu99 cflags: -g -O2 ldflags: Adjustment methods: RANDR: yes VidMode: yes WinGDI: no Location providers: GNOME Clock: no GUI: statusicon ~/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1# make ~/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1# make make all-recursive make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1' Making all in src make[2]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' Making all in gtk-redshift make[3]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src/gtk-redshift' sed -e "s|\@gui_module\@|statusicon|g" gtk-redshift.in > gtk-redshift make[3]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src/gtk-redshift' make[3]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' CC redshift.o In file included from redshift.c:60: gamma-randr.h:33: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before xcb_randr_crtc_t make[3]: *** [redshift.o] Error 1 make[3]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1' make: *** [all] Error 2 This is Linux mind you, not some AIX box on which it will never compile, even though it has X11 installed. (And yes, I know I can disable RANDR in the above case and it will compile, that's beside the point)
fgf 16y ago
I love it.
augustl 16y ago
Why is it only for Ubuntu? Or is it also runnable on, say, any GNOME setup?
- pmjordan 16y ago
  There's a github link, so presumably it's only packaged for Ubuntu. I'm hoping I can get it running on OpenSUSE/KDE4.
  - kilian 16y ago
    If it has appindicator support, it'll run. I'm not sure if any other distributions already support it though. If you could let me know if you can get it to work on openSUSE/KDE4, (email in my profile) that'd be great!
    - pmjordan 16y ago
      Appindicator does seem to be the critical bit; I'm still on OpenSUSE 11.2 which definitely has zero support, planning to upgrade to 11.3, which might, at the weekend. I'll keep you updated. My Python isn't so great unfortunately, so it'd probably take me too long to port it to something more widely supported.
- kilian 16y ago
  It's using an appindicator, which is (for now) a Ubuntu only thing. I really hope other distributions pick it up, because it's absolutely wonderful.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
cturner 16y ago
I've been using flux and find it works as advertised on helping my sleep patterns. Thanks for your work on it.
arohner 16y ago
I started using F.lux a month or so ago to help with insomnia. It's helped a lot, thank you for writing it. I've been holding out on buying an iPad to read in bed, precisely because F.lux has helped me so much on OSX. Is there a flux equivalent for iOS? Is it possible to write one?
- danlove 16y ago
  Would be possible for an application to mimic Flux, but there is no way (except on a Jailbroken device) to do system wide Flux. Could be a nice niche for a browser or RSS reader though.
  - jaf12duke 16y ago
    Is there a version for Jailbroken devices?
  - herf 16y ago
    I have a bunch of hacks, but nothing that actually works right on iOS yet.
- kilian 16y ago
  Thanks! To be fair, Michael Herf ('herf' here on HN) did most of the work, I just made a pretty GUI :) Man, I would love a F.lux for the iPad! Shame that's not possible unless Apple built it into the OS themselves.
sbarre 16y ago
I will chime in with the chorus and say I've been using F.lux for at least a month and it works great! Thank you!
sgentle 16y ago
The last version of XFlux I used reset the screen brightness every second, which made the screen flicker uncontrollably during fades (eg on lock, logout, screen saver etc). Does that still happen?
- kilian 16y ago
  It does this if you're running more than one instance of XFlux, they, uhm, seem to fight with each other ;). F.lux for Ubuntu prevents you from starting the app more than once :)
ryanca 16y ago
Has anyone figured out how to get this to work on a multi-display configuration? I tried it and found it only affected my primary screen.
- kilian 16y ago
  It's probably of no help to you, but I use a dualscreen nVidia setup (twinview), and it just works.
thaumaturgy 16y ago
Great! I've been a huge fan of F.lux on OS X for a very long time. The beautiful thing about the recent "gradual change" feature is that now I don't even notice it when I'm working late at night -- unless I have to turn off the application for some reason, and then I find myself squinting and fleeing. Anyway, just wanted to take a moment out to thank you for helping so many people out.
kristiandupont 16y ago
I have been using it for almost a year and it is on my list of must install programs. And I am very picky about what I run in the system tray.
hackermom 16y ago
I use the OS X version of this to combat my sleeping disorder - and reducing the amount of blue light during the mandatory "bedtime hacking" definitely does help to sedate me.
quadhome 16y ago
I e-mailed the author months ago about a bug where the glibc command-line version would stay alive and peg to 100% CPU usage after logout. It seems to have never been fixed. Any chance you could ping him about that?
- herf 16y ago
  I didn't get that email! But I'll look into it right now.
- herf 16y ago
  Fix is posted: https://secure.herf.org/flux/xflux.tgz https://secure.herf.org/flux/xflux.tgz I wasn't able to find this in the old build, but the current one definitely has the bug. Let me know how it works.
  - quadhome 16y ago
    Thank you! Testing now. Redshift is nice. But, the colours in xflux feel better. Nothing quantifiable though. I spent a little bit of time a few months ago trying to dump the gamma tables to compare. Only accomplished reminding myself why I hate low-level X.
maqr 16y ago
I use f.lux backwards. I leave it on normally, but when I need to wake up to re-focus and get stuff done (and it's dark out), I turn it off, and I feel more awake again. It's probably all in my head, but I'm going with it for now ;)
- user24 16y ago
  no, that really does work, at least it seems so for me; I have it set to the default settings but if I'm working late and feeling tired I switch it off and enjoy the "brightness kick". One of the greatest features of f.lux for me is that I actually start feeling more tired after it kicks in, so it really does encourage me to get to bed earlier.
chengas123 16y ago
That's awesome!! Thank you! I just gave up my Windows machine for Ubuntu and F.lux was one of the things I missed most. Is there a .deb I can download directly? I don't think I can add new repositories on my work computer.
- winthrowe 16y ago
  you can install a deb package, but not add a source? That seems like an odd configuration to me.
  - chengas123 16y ago
    agreed, but i wasn't the one to make that decision :o)
fizzfur 16y ago
I installed the osx version of flux ages ago and never looked back, stunningly unintrusive. Although waking up in the morning to find your beautiful late design is bright cyan is a bit of a shocker sometimes.
ydant 16y ago
It complained about not supporting my color depth (although nvidia-settings is set to 24 bit). before (last 100 chars): we only support 24/32-bit displays right now. XF86VidModeGetGammaRampSize returned 2048 entries. xflux does the same. It's a new laptop - i7 in 64bit mode, so I don't know if that's at fault. I loved xflux on the old (32bit, nvidia) laptop, though. Redshift as mentioned by paulsmith works great.
rlpb 16y ago
xflux is included as a binary in the package source. I'm sure you mean well, but this is a security risk and breaks the terms of use for the Launchpad PPA (as it is not distributed under a permitted licence). You could host the package elsewhere, though.

91 points by kilian 16y ago

F.lux adjusts the color of your computer's monitor to match the time of day. It's warm at night and like sunlight during the day. I've been using F.lux for a couple of months on OS X. The orange color at night looked a odd to me at first, but now I don't notice it. F.lux can help you sleep better: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/research.html http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/research.html

mwsherman 16y ago

I've been using it for a month or two on Windows and am quite surprised how much I like it.

farmerbuzz 16y ago
Flux didn't change the appearance enough for me -- what I really want is to have light text on a dark background at night. One ugly hack is to use the Windows 7 magnifier tool to invert video. The colors are atrocious but you can pretend they are neon lights for night mode ;)

paulsmith 16y ago

A similar program for automatically changing the color temperature, Redshift [1], was recently highlighted by Lifehacker and others as an alternative to the commandline-only XFlux, inspired by F.lux. EDIT: One advantage Redshift has is that it automatically determines your lng/lat based on your current "home" location in the Clock applet. [1]: http://jonls.dk/redshift/ http://jonls.dk/redshift/

there 16y ago
redshift is also open source and thus works on other platforms, where f.lux is closed source.
- jlcgull 16y ago
  f.lux works as advertised. Love it. Use it. Highly recommend it. More so, now that is has nice GUI and all. The fact that it is closed source should not be a problem unless you are RMS!
  - there 16y ago
    The fact that it is closed source should not be a problem unless you are RMS! um, or unless you use an operating system or architecture for which they don't build a binary, so you can't use it no matter how well it works as advertised.
    - jlcgull 16y ago
      Sure. OSS is great and I am a big fan. But which major OS is f.lux not available for, again? Your argument in the present context is exactly what I was referring to when I mentioned RMS! Also, f.lux does work as advertised on the OSs that it is available for. :-)
      - nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
        > But which major OS is f.lux not available for, again? FreeBSD > f.lux does work as advertised on the OSs that it is available for.
- nuxi 16y ago
  It works on other platforms because it's open source? Isn't that a bit of an overstatement? For the fun of it, I just downloaded this and tried to compile on my Linux box: ~/tmp/tmp# uname -a Linux susie 2.6.27.39-0.2-default #1 SMP 2009-11-23 12:57:38 +0100 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux ~/tmp/tmp# cat /etc/SuSE-release openSUSE 11.1 (x86_64) VERSION = 11.1 ~/tmp/tmp# wget http://launchpad.net/redshift/trunk/1.4.1/+download/redshift-1.4.1.tar.bz2 ~/tmp/tmp# tar xf redshift-1.4.1.tar.bz2 ~/tmp/tmp# cd redshift-1.4.1/ ~/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1# ./configure [...] redshift 1.4.1 prefix: /usr/local compiler: gcc -std=gnu99 cflags: -g -O2 ldflags: Adjustment methods: RANDR: yes VidMode: yes WinGDI: no Location providers: GNOME Clock: no GUI: statusicon ~/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1# make ~/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1# make make all-recursive make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1' Making all in src make[2]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' Making all in gtk-redshift make[3]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src/gtk-redshift' sed -e "s|\@gui_module\@|statusicon|g" gtk-redshift.in > gtk-redshift make[3]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src/gtk-redshift' make[3]: Entering directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' CC redshift.o In file included from redshift.c:60: gamma-randr.h:33: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before xcb_randr_crtc_t make[3]: *** [redshift.o] Error 1 make[3]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1/src' make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmp/tmp/redshift-1.4.1' make: *** [all] Error 2 This is Linux mind you, not some AIX box on which it will never compile, even though it has X11 installed. (And yes, I know I can disable RANDR in the above case and it will compile, that's beside the point)

fgf 16y ago

I love it.

augustl 16y ago

Why is it only for Ubuntu? Or is it also runnable on, say, any GNOME setup?

pmjordan 16y ago
There's a github link, so presumably it's only packaged for Ubuntu. I'm hoping I can get it running on OpenSUSE/KDE4.
- kilian 16y ago
  If it has appindicator support, it'll run. I'm not sure if any other distributions already support it though. If you could let me know if you can get it to work on openSUSE/KDE4, (email in my profile) that'd be great!
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    Appindicator does seem to be the critical bit; I'm still on OpenSUSE 11.2 which definitely has zero support, planning to upgrade to 11.3, which might, at the weekend. I'll keep you updated. My Python isn't so great unfortunately, so it'd probably take me too long to port it to something more widely supported.
kilian 16y ago
It's using an appindicator, which is (for now) a Ubuntu only thing. I really hope other distributions pick it up, because it's absolutely wonderful.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

cturner 16y ago

I've been using flux and find it works as advertised on helping my sleep patterns. Thanks for your work on it.

arohner 16y ago

I started using F.lux a month or so ago to help with insomnia. It's helped a lot, thank you for writing it. I've been holding out on buying an iPad to read in bed, precisely because F.lux has helped me so much on OSX. Is there a flux equivalent for iOS? Is it possible to write one?

danlove 16y ago
Would be possible for an application to mimic Flux, but there is no way (except on a Jailbroken device) to do system wide Flux. Could be a nice niche for a browser or RSS reader though.
- jaf12duke 16y ago
  Is there a version for Jailbroken devices?
- herf 16y ago
  I have a bunch of hacks, but nothing that actually works right on iOS yet.
kilian 16y ago
Thanks! To be fair, Michael Herf ('herf' here on HN) did most of the work, I just made a pretty GUI :) Man, I would love a F.lux for the iPad! Shame that's not possible unless Apple built it into the OS themselves.

sbarre 16y ago

I will chime in with the chorus and say I've been using F.lux for at least a month and it works great! Thank you!

sgentle 16y ago

The last version of XFlux I used reset the screen brightness every second, which made the screen flicker uncontrollably during fades (eg on lock, logout, screen saver etc). Does that still happen?

kilian 16y ago
It does this if you're running more than one instance of XFlux, they, uhm, seem to fight with each other ;). F.lux for Ubuntu prevents you from starting the app more than once :)

ryanca 16y ago

Has anyone figured out how to get this to work on a multi-display configuration? I tried it and found it only affected my primary screen.

kilian 16y ago
It's probably of no help to you, but I use a dualscreen nVidia setup (twinview), and it just works.

thaumaturgy 16y ago

Great! I've been a huge fan of F.lux on OS X for a very long time. The beautiful thing about the recent "gradual change" feature is that now I don't even notice it when I'm working late at night -- unless I have to turn off the application for some reason, and then I find myself squinting and fleeing. Anyway, just wanted to take a moment out to thank you for helping so many people out.

kristiandupont 16y ago

I have been using it for almost a year and it is on my list of must install programs. And I am very picky about what I run in the system tray.

hackermom 16y ago

I use the OS X version of this to combat my sleeping disorder - and reducing the amount of blue light during the mandatory "bedtime hacking" definitely does help to sedate me.

quadhome 16y ago

I e-mailed the author months ago about a bug where the glibc command-line version would stay alive and peg to 100% CPU usage after logout. It seems to have never been fixed. Any chance you could ping him about that?

herf 16y ago
I didn't get that email! But I'll look into it right now.
herf 16y ago
Fix is posted: https://secure.herf.org/flux/xflux.tgz https://secure.herf.org/flux/xflux.tgz I wasn't able to find this in the old build, but the current one definitely has the bug. Let me know how it works.
- quadhome 16y ago
  Thank you! Testing now. Redshift is nice. But, the colours in xflux feel better. Nothing quantifiable though. I spent a little bit of time a few months ago trying to dump the gamma tables to compare. Only accomplished reminding myself why I hate low-level X.

maqr 16y ago

I use f.lux backwards. I leave it on normally, but when I need to wake up to re-focus and get stuff done (and it's dark out), I turn it off, and I feel more awake again. It's probably all in my head, but I'm going with it for now ;)

user24 16y ago
no, that really does work, at least it seems so for me; I have it set to the default settings but if I'm working late and feeling tired I switch it off and enjoy the "brightness kick". One of the greatest features of f.lux for me is that I actually start feeling more tired after it kicks in, so it really does encourage me to get to bed earlier.

chengas123 16y ago

That's awesome!! Thank you! I just gave up my Windows machine for Ubuntu and F.lux was one of the things I missed most. Is there a .deb I can download directly? I don't think I can add new repositories on my work computer.

winthrowe 16y ago
you can install a deb package, but not add a source? That seems like an odd configuration to me.
- chengas123 16y ago
  agreed, but i wasn't the one to make that decision :o)

fizzfur 16y ago

I installed the osx version of flux ages ago and never looked back, stunningly unintrusive. Although waking up in the morning to find your beautiful late design is bright cyan is a bit of a shocker sometimes.

ydant 16y ago

It complained about not supporting my color depth (although nvidia-settings is set to 24 bit). before (last 100 chars): we only support 24/32-bit displays right now. XF86VidModeGetGammaRampSize returned 2048 entries. xflux does the same. It's a new laptop - i7 in 64bit mode, so I don't know if that's at fault. I loved xflux on the old (32bit, nvidia) laptop, though. Redshift as mentioned by paulsmith works great.

rlpb 16y ago

xflux is included as a binary in the package source. I'm sure you mean well, but this is a security risk and breaks the terms of use for the Launchpad PPA (as it is not distributed under a permitted licence). You could host the package elsewhere, though.