Poll (was Re: [SGVLUG] Possible "Cool Tools" topic)

Dustin laurence at alice.caltech.edu
Thu Nov 3 12:34:57 PST 2005


On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Claude Felizardo wrote:

> On my box at work it looks like I've got the default values of 1 as
> expected but I really don't have many pics on this box here but I do
> at home.

This is the dark side of the unix way of doing things--gamma should be
adjusted for each computer, so guessing in advance is likely to be wrong.
So what do do?  Sane people would at least set the default to a best guess
value like 1.14 or something for the sake of people who won't or can't
adjust theirs, and I suspect that's what Microsoft and Apple do.  It
certainly doesn't hurt the person who will tweak their monitor themselves.  
The X-Windows distributors and Linux distributions, however, seem to have
decided that since they don't know the right value, they will choose a 
"simple" value of 1.0--which is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong.

So, for those who use friendlier distros than I do (or any distro,
really)--run "xgamma" at the command line.  Are the values 1.0, or 
something else?  I'm most interested to know if anyone is running a distro 
that sets the values to something other than 1.0 without you doing it 
yourself.

The odd thing is that this could easily be an optional installer step for 
distros that have pretensions of being desktop friendly.

Dustin



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