How to calibrate the monitor on an Ubuntu system?

What is the procedure to calibrate the monitor and what software to use?

Edit: I think what I mean is "colour profile" if that's what it is called. I happened to notice that the same photos look very differently indeed on my home laptop and on other computers…


You can use GNOME Color Manager to install color profiles, perform calibration and adjust color settings. For full functionality, you'll need ICC profiles that provide the required information for your devices.


If you don't use unity (or gnome), using gnome-color-manager does NOT work (see How do you set system display color profiles in Xubuntu and Lubuntu? for the glory details).

However, there is an excellent german howto all necessary things manually: http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Monitor_profilieren_mit_ArgyllCMS


I think that a ColorHug2 (http://www.hughski.com/colorhug2.html) is probably the best choice IMHO. I want something with Linux software out of the box and this looks like the right product.

I'm writting this so that other people googling will find the product.


I ran into the same issue using Ubuntu Mate 16.04. The solution was really simple. Go to Ubuntu Software Center and do a search for DisplayCal. Their direct url is http://displaycal.net/. It works amazingly well and quite simply utilizing my Spyder 3 Elite spectrometer. You will have to have a spectrometer to do this. In a dual boot system with Windows, you can import the icc or icm profile from Windows to Ubuntu.

Hope this will help others who have run into this issue.

j.Michael Hill Photography