New Monitor- How do I adjust seetings?

santotomas · posted: 2015-06-10 19:50

I just bought a new AOC monitor for this Antix machine (formerly XP). It installed just fine- plugged in and turned it on and everything ok. Now I want to adjust brightness and some color settings - the brightness is rather intense and it's hurting my eyes. Through what application can I adjust this as the driver that came with this monitor is useless for me as it is geared to Windows machine? Control Cenre? Help please.

BitJam · posted: 2015-06-10 20:06

All of my monitors have buttons that launch an OSD for adjust brightness and contrast and so forth. You didn't specify the model so I don't know if your model has these buttons or not. Many AOC monitors do.

If yours doesn't have buttons, I don't know of any way to control the monitor and any OSD menus directly from Linux. Maybe this is something new that I haven't heard about yet.

The next thing to look at is your video driver. I use the nvidia driver and there is a really sweet nvidia-settings program that lets me control the brightness and a bunch of other things. But this sort of solution will depend entirely on your graphics hardware and the driver you use.

I've attached a screen shot of nvidia-settings.

fatmac · posted: 2015-06-11 07:26

Likewise, all my LCD monitors have buttons at the bottom on the bezel for adjustments. There should be something in the instructions that came with yours.

santotomas · posted: 2015-06-11 11:24

fatmac wrote:Likewise, all my LCD monitors have buttons at the bottom on the bezel for adjustments. There should be something in the instructions that came with yours.

Thanks for responding. It's rather frustrating. This is an AOC LED monitor with only 1 button on the bezel- the on/off button. Has absolutely no other buttons to adjust anything. Didn't come with instruction manual- had to download it off the web and it only covers Windows users. The instructions for Windows does have a way of adjusting brightness but not for Linux. I guess I'll have to look for some kind of filter to filter out some of this brightness or else...my eyes will go on me. __{{emoticon}}__

dolphin_oracle · posted: 2015-06-11 12:04

how is the monitor connected to your computer?

if the monitor is exposing an interface for it, you could try xbacklight (available in repos).

I use xbacklight in my startup files on my laptop to set my initial brightness to 70%

Code: Select all

xbacklight -set 70

fatmac · posted: 2015-06-11 13:54

If no other means is found you might be able to get a neutral density filter for a screen, they used to be sold but haven't heard of them for quite some time.

rokytnji · posted: 2015-06-11 14:45

You should be able to handle this.

redshift-not-working-t4479.html

It will dim the screen just a little and soften the colors for you.

santotomas · posted: 2015-06-11 20:45

dolphin_oracle wrote:how is the monitor connected to your computer?

if the monitor is exposing an interface for it, you could try xbacklight (available in repos).

I use xbacklight in my startup files on my laptop to set my initial brightness to 70%
Code: Select all
xbacklight -set 70

Dolphin,
My monitor is connected to the cpu the same way as the old monitor was, No drama there. With one of those blue plug cables?? with the 2 little screw thingies? (Do not know what you call it). Anyway, I`will give xbacklight a try before I give up. Forgive my ignorance, but how do I install xbacklight, with synaptic or through the terminal? Can you give me a clue? Thanks a lot to all of you. Oh, BTW fatmac, I just happened to find one of those old filters that I had in a bunch of stuff I was discarding. I might have to resurrect it afterall if the xbacklight tip doesn't work. __{{emoticon}}__

dolphin_oracle · posted: 2015-06-11 21:02

santotomas wrote:
dolphin_oracle wrote:how is the monitor connected to your computer?

if the monitor is exposing an interface for it, you could try xbacklight (available in repos).

I use xbacklight in my startup files on my laptop to set my initial brightness to 70%
Code: Select all
xbacklight -set 70
Dolphin,
My monitor is connected to the cpu the same way as the old monitor was, No drama there. With one of those blue plug cables?? with the 2 little screw thingies? (Do not know what you call it). Anyway, I`will give xbacklight a try before I give up. Forgive my ignorance, but how do I install xbacklight, with synaptic or through the terminal? Can you give me a clue? Thanks a lot to all of you. Oh, BTW fatmac, I just happened to find one of those old filters that I had in a bunch of stuff I was discarding. I might have to resurrect it afterall if the xbacklight tip doesn't work. __{{emoticon}}__

It doesn't matter how you install it. Its in the default repos, so its accesible from synaptic or from the commandline. The command line (as root user) would be:

Code: Select all

apt-get update 
apt-get install xbacklight

xbacklight is a commandline app though, so it won't be in the menu. just try (as regular user)

Code: Select all

xbacklight -set 70%

and see if your brightness drops a bit. If it does, then you can fine tune as desired. The percentage is a set level, expressed as a percentage of maximum. My system only steps in 10% increments, but I've seen some systems that will step a little finer than that.

santotomas · posted: 2015-06-12 09:29

Dolphin,
I installed xbacklight through synaptic and tried your fix. The following message is what I got on the terminal:

xbacklight -set 70%
No outputs have backlight property

I updated menu and rebooted and sill got the same menu. ??

dolphin_oracle · posted: 2015-06-12 11:46

what that means is that xbacklight will not work with your monitor.

BTW there is no menu entry for xbacklight. it's command line only.

redshift might be an option (see roky's post above). it will adjust the color temperature of the output to the monitor, but its not a real fine control. But i might take some of the screaming brightness off.

kmathern · posted: 2015-06-12 12:13

The xbacklight command also doesn't work with my display, but I can use xrandr to change the brightness, something like this:

Code: Select all

xrandr --output $(xrandr --verbose | grep \ connected\ | awk '{print $1}') --gamma 2.0:2.0:2.0 --brightness 1.0

I change the --gamma values. They're all"1.0" by default. I try to keep the 3 of them at the same value.

How you increase/decrease brightness seems to be somewhat inconsistent between Xorg versions and video drivers. In some cases decreasing the --gamma values decreases the brightness, in other cases (like my example above) I need to increase them to decrease the display's brightness.

I usually leave the --brightness setting at 1.0, but you can make small changes with it.

dolphin_oracle · posted: 2015-06-12 12:32

kmathern wrote:The xbacklight command also doesn't work with my display, but I can use xrandr to change the brightness, something like this:
Code: Select all
xrandr --output $(xrandr --verbose | grep \ connected\ | awk '{print $1}') --gamma 2.0:2.0:2.0 --brightness 1.0
I change the --gamma values. They're all"1.0" by default. I try to keep the 3 of them at the same value.

How you increase/decrease brightness seems to be somewhat inconsistent between Xorg versions and video drivers. In some cases decreasing the --gamma values decreases the brightness, in other cases (like my example above) I need to increase them to decrease the display's brightness.

I usually leave the --brightness setting at 1.0, but you can make small changes with it.

Wow, why didn't I think of xrandr!?

My test system at work, with a LCD panel hooked to a VGA port/cable, works pretty well with this.

kmathern gets pretty fancy with the comandline-fu, but this part:

Code: Select all

$(xrandr --verbose | grep \ connected\ | awk '{print $1}')

is just automatically figuring out the monitor output name. You can look at it directly with:

Code: Select all

xrandr

and see which one is connected.

and sure enough, my gamma values here needed to go down rather than up like kmathern's, so my command to get something comfortable was:

Code: Select all

xrandr --output VGA1 --gamma .7:.7:.7

kmathern · posted: 2015-06-12 13:03

dolphin_oracle wrote:...kmathern gets pretty fancy with the comandline-fu, but this part:
Code: Select all
$(xrandr --verbose | grep \ connected\ | awk '{print $1}')
is just automatically figuring out the monitor output name. You can look at it directly with:
Code: Select all
xrandr
and see which one is connected.

and sure enough, my gamma values here needed to go down rather than up like kmathern's, so my command to get something comfortable was:
Code: Select all
xrandr --output VGA1 --gamma .7:.7:.7

On my machine the output name varies depending on the video driver that's being used. Right now I'm using the fglrx driver. With it the output name is"CRT1" (even though it's a LCD display). When I use the radeon driver it's named"VGA-1".

I don't know if it'll work with antiX-13, but with MX-14 I'm able to use a .xsessionrc file to set the brightness. When starting the desktop it automatically changes from Xorg's default --gamma setting, to the setting I prefer.

dolphin_oracle · posted: 2015-06-12 13:13

On my machine the output name varies depending on the video driver that's being used. Right now I'm using the fglrx driver. With it the output name is"CRT1" (even though it's a LCD display). When I use the radeon driver it's named"VGA-1".

I don't know if it'll work with antiX-13, but with MX-14 I'm able to use a .xsessionrc file to set the brightness. When starting the desktop it automatically changes from Xorg's default --gamma setting, to the setting I prefer.

In antiX, you can put the xrandr command line in either the windowmanager startup file or if you are using the antiX 15 beta, you can put the command in the new global desktop session startup (see Session Tab in Control Center) file and it will start with any session of X for any user. I use those areas to set the resolution in my virtualbox install since our VESA xorg defaults to a taller resolution than my screen supports (xrandr --set 1024x768)