How to fix Redshift in Manjaro Linux i3

Redshift is a very cool program that can help in keeping your eyesight healthy — it’ll tint your screen red a little bit when the night approaches.

This puts less strain in your eyes.

The problem

Everything was working good, I had the redshift package installed and had setup it to start automatically on my ~/.i3/config.

It was just after an update that I started to see this when trying to run it:

Trying location provider `geoclue2'...
Using provider `geoclue2'.
Using method `randr'.
Waiting for initial location to become available...
Unable to start GeoClue client:
 GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply:
 Message recipient disconnected from message bus without replying.
Unable to get location from provider.

And seeing this dialog when trying to start redshift-gtk:

It never worked after that, even with the newest versions for geoclue2 and redshift:

pacman -Q geoclue2 redshift
geoclue2 2.4.12-1
redshift 1.12-2

The solution

After doing some sleuthing, I found a solution.

Edit your /etc/geoclue/geoclue.conf file, and add this at the end:

# ...
[redshift]
allowed=true
system=false
users=

To start Redshift automatically, add these lines to your ~/.i3/config:

exec --no-startup-id /usr/lib/geoclue-2.0/demos/agent
exec --no-startup-id redshift-gtk

That’s it!

Links

• Redshift — Redshift adjusts the color temperature of your screen according to your surroundings.
• ArchWiki – Redshift
• redshift disallowed from using GeoClue