Budgie Monitor Brightness Applet

Control your monitors brightness using the DDC/CI protocol.

---

---

Dependencies

budgie-1.0 >= 2
ddcutil >= 0.9.0
udev

These can be installed on Solus by running:

sudo eopkg it -c system.devel
sudo eopkg it budgie-desktop-devel ddcutil-devel

Building and Installation

meson --prefix=/usr --buildtype=plain build
cd build
ninja
sudo ninja install

Finally logout and login again

Troubleshooting for external monitors

Test, if your monitor is capable of DDC/CI.

Use ddcutil to check, if your hardware is capable of DDC/CI:

ddcutil detect

Here an overview of your connected monitors has to be shown, otherwise the budgie-monitor-brightness-applet won't work. If no monitor is shown, you may have to enable a feature called DDC/CI in your monitor OSD. If you are using a Nvidia graphics card and the output gives you error messages like "Invalid display" and "DDC communication failed" for your monitor, you may need another workaround.

On Solus this issue can be fixed by running

echo 'nvidia.NVreg_RegistryDwords=RMUseSwI2c=0x01 nvidia.RMI2cSpeed=100' | sudo tee /etc/kernel/cmdline.d/90_nvidia.conf
sudo clr-boot-manager update # reboot after this

Manual configuration

The build script automatically sets udev rules to give everyone RW access to the /dev/i2c devices and sets the kernel-module i2c_dev to be loaded on every startup. If you want to configure this yourself manually, you can pass the parameters -Dset_udev_configuration=false and -Dset_kernel_module_configuration=false to meson. This could be useful, if you want to add a special group that gains access to your i2c devices. More information at https://www.ddcutil.com/config/

Manual configuration of udev

Add a group that gains permissions to access the I²C interfaces and add your user to that group:

sudo groupadd --system i2c
sudo usermod $USER -aG i2c

ddcutil comes with an udev rule that gives the group i2c RW permissions to the i2c interfaces. This one has to be copied to /etc/udev/rules.d

sudo cp /usr/share/ddcutil/data/45-ddcutils-i2c.rules /etc/udev/rules.d

Manual configuration of kernel module

The module i2c_dev has to be loaded on every startup:

sudo sh -c "echo i2c_dev > /etc/modules-load.d/i2c-dev.conf"

Finally reboot

TODO

• support external monitors

• support internal displays

• add translations

• detect connect and disconnect of external monitors

• add xrandr as fallback