Redshift 1.12 has a mind of its own

Getting Redshift to work on my normal desktop was relatively unproblematic, but on my laptop it was a whole other matter.

No matter what I tried: putting .desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart or .config/autostart, putting files into /usr/share/applications from my desktop install, nothing worked. It would run from the terminal but there was no tray icon and it wouldn't autostart. After a bit of digging it seemed that 1.12 was looking in /usr/lib64/python3.6 for the Redshift scripts - but there are none there. This is very strange since the scripts are always installed in /python2.7. On my desktop this is the case too. Copying the redshift_gtk folder to /python3.6 made no difference either. It still failed to load.

In the end I gave up with 1.12 on my laptop and went for version 1.8 which works with Slackware 14.1. After installing it, logging out and in again, Redshift 1.8 works perfectly, tray icon, autostart, no complaints whatsoever. Reinstalling 1.12 fails to work, presumably because Redshift is looking in /python3.6 for files that just aren't there.

This is totally bizarre since my desktop runs 1.12 and the correct files are in /python2.7, but for some reason, on this laptop, Redshift wants to look in /python3.6. I don't understand at all. Any light that could be shed on this would be appreciated, but for now I'm going to put this down to gremlins.

Do you have python3 installed on your desktop too, or just the laptop?

Originally Posted by montagdude Do you have python3 installed on your desktop too, or just the laptop?

Python 3 is on both.

Desktop:

lysander@psychopig-xxxiv:~$ ls /var/log/packages | grep python
dbus-python-1.2.4-x86_64-1
notify-python-0.1.1-x86_64-5
python-2.7.15-x86_64-1_slack14.2
python-evdev-1.0.0-x86_64-1_SBo
python-pillow-3.0.0-x86_64-1
python-setuptools-22.0.5-x86_64-1
python-webencodings-0.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo
python3-3.6.5-x86_64-1_SBo

Very strange.

Have you tried communicating any of your redshift issues upstream?

https://github.com/jonls/redshift/issues

You don't say if you're building packages on one system and copying them around. You don't say what order you built and installed python3, pyxdg and redshift. This is the root of your problem.

If a python package is built when python3 is already installed, it will need python3 versions of its python dependencies (in this case pyxdg).

Now that you have python3 on your laptop, you should rebuild and reinstall pyxdg, then rebuild and reinstall redshift, and it's likely that your problem will go away.