DisplayCAL 3.1

In 2009 I purchased a Spyder3 colorimeter from Don's Photo here in Winnipeg. Because I run Linux there was initially no software to run this piece of hardware.

But in 2011 came DispCalGUI, since renamed to DisplayCAL.

I have been running DispCalGUI ver. 2 since 2013-14 on my Lenovo T61 laptop, in Fedora Linux MATE.

Running just fine until ver. 3 came out in 2014-15. That's when I began to have problems even loading the software, as it required a newer version of Python to run at all. I went thru the whole '0install' thing to no avail.

I finally gave up for a bit, frustrated that I may never get this great utility to work again.

So after several months I found the answer.

The newer version of DisplayCAL absolutely requires GTK 3. Not only that, but it will no longer run in MATE, which is based on the older GTK 2.

DisplayCAL 3 would not run the ambient light sensor in MATE. It would not auto-install new profiles. As a workaround for that second problem, I had to use a kluge (workaround) in my Startup list using 'dispwin' and the name of the profile I wanted to load. All of these problems disappear once I used the software from within GNOME 3.

Switch to GNOME 3, and everything is fine.

So to successfully have DisplayCAL run correctly, you need to be running the GNOME 3 desktop environment.