This year I had the chance of joining the FOSDEM conference again and as always it was great to meet up with other FLOSS enthusiasts.

It was also a good chance to meet with some Xfce folks (Harald, Florian) and sponsors (Volkan) and finally it was a good time to hack on stuff. This year I sat down with Florian in the evenings and invested some time into colord integration.

About colord

colord is – in short – a system service that enables you to manage, install and generate color profiles to accurately color manage input (webcams, scanners) and output devices (displays, printers). colord itself comes only with a commandline tool (colormgr), which is not great in terms of discoverability and usability. Both Gnome and KDE have already integrated colord support into both their settings dialogs and settings daemons, but in Xfce there was no easy way to achieve a color-managed session.

Status of the integration into Xfce

In order to enable people to set up color management I decided to start with the frontend. In theory you can already get a working setup in Xfce by relying on cupsd (for printers), saned (for scanners) and xiccd (for displays) and handling colord through the colormgr commandline tool.

What we managed at FOSDEM was still pretty rough but I took a few days (read: nights) and polished the dialog so it became more and more user friendly and the final product can be seen in the screenshot above.

The dialog enables you to:

Enable/disable color management per device

Add or import color profiles per device

Enable a profile and set it as default

What it doesn’t do:

calibration – you still have to use e.g. displaycal to calibrate your display

show detailed profile information (like a horseshoe color diagram), you still have to use e.g. gcm-viewer for that

“So, that’s great – what else is missing?” I hear you ask. That’s quite simple: In short, we need to integrate the backend for colord into xfsettingsd so we don’t have to rely on xiccd anymore. While it seems to run stable here for me it’s yet another daemon, so xfsettingsd integration would definitely be a plus.

The cool thing about the frontend is however that everyone can already use it for printers and scanners, because those are natively supported already.

“When can I have this?” may be your reasonable follow-up question. I’m still ironing out small kinks (not too many hopefully) and I still have quite a bit of code cleanup ahead of me, but my current plan is to get this feature merged before we release Xfce 4.14, so the likelihood of it showing up in the next (or subsequent) development release of xfce4-settings is high. It then still depends on your Linux distribution whether the colord integration is included, because it’s a compile-time option (not every user/distro may want having to pull in colord, as it’s yet another service that’s running all the time).

Finally I’m not sure I’ll have time for the backend part in the very near future, so we’ll have to see about that. Luckily the dialog is useful even as it is.

In the meantime you can support me through friendly words, posting a bug bounty on colord backend integration or you can do some testing and provide me with feedback through checking out my branch, currently hosted on GitHub.