v2.0.0 - Ambient light and travelling by Bus
Ambient-Light-Level slider
I've added an Ambient-Light-Level slider - one slider for adjusting brightness on all displays.
This slider works with the existing Lux Options that allow you to define a ambient-light to brightness mapping for each display (the existing lux options need to be enabled).
I've added an immediate-lighting-check button (stopwatch icon in bottom toolbar) and a corresponding context-menu item (when lux options are enabled).
D-Bus Interface for up to 10x faster response times.
I've written a related package: ddcutil-service, a D-Bus wrapper for libddcutil . If ddcutil-service is available, vdu_controls will use it instead of the ddcutil command.
Because the service stays running and initialized it can be up to ten times faster than issuing ddcutil commands. Control-sliders are far more responsive and act more smoothly. Restoring Presets and refreshing the interface are also much faster. The service is implemented in C which eliminates the previous shell+exec overheads incurred when running ddcutil commands.
The service provides some event detection capabilities. Depending on hardware, drivers and cabling, vdu_controls may now receive signals from the service for hotplug and DPMS events. Exactly which events are supported is subject to GPU, GPU driver limitations (AMD generally works out of the box). At a minimum, the service can fallback to polled hotplug detection (defaulting to a 30 second poll, minimum 10 seconds, so change detection by polling is not exactly swift).
Adding the option for using the new ddcutil-service is the main reason for the version bump to 2.0. The existing code had to be refactored to support options for both the ddcutil-service and the existing ddcutil command. The the option to use DDC via the ddcutil command will remain supported, the option may be reviewed if the ddcutil-service becomes universally available.
More tweaks and icons
As usual there have been a number tweaks to the user-interface and internals, plus I've added a few more icons for use with presets.
Notes on Packaging for Distributions.
See issue #71