This is a very simple application that will make a lot of laptop users very happy

Feb 27, 2014 16:16 GMT  ·  By

WildGuppy is a very handy application that will help laptop Ubuntu users better manage the screen luminosity by linking it to the embedded webcam.

It may not seem like much, but the ability to set your computer to automatically change its brightness in accordance with the ambient lighting is an extremely desired feature. If you think about it, phones have had this ability for quite some time and it's strange why it never got properly implemented in Linux.

There are a number of considerations that must be satisfied when using such an application. First of all, the brightness setting is not something standard. Some people are more sensitive to light, other require a much brighter screen.

WildGuppy comes with a number of settings that should fix this concern. Also, people might wonder if the laptop in question would spend more energy constantly adapting to the ambient lighting, or less, if you like your screen dark. The answer is neither. The developer explained that there shouldn't be any noticeable effect on the battery.

How does it work?

The principle of the app is so simple that you might think that the Internet is full of this kind of software. The webcam takes a sample, at regular intervals that can be set by the user, and adjusts the brightness according to the minimal or maximal settings.

The installation is pretty simple and the developer has provided a PPA, which should make things a lot easier. You will need root access and access to a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fantasyleague0629/wildguppy sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wildguppy There are also a couple of dependencies that need to be resolved in order to make the application work, xbacklight and fswebcam. Both of the libraries can be found in the Ubuntu repositories, so it's fairly easy to install them. Open a terminal and enter the following commands (you need root access):

sudo apt-get install xbacklight sudo apt-get install fswebcam

If everything works well, you should be able to run the application without any effort. Unfortunately, it's a little problematic to make it run at startup. In order to make it work, you will have to download a small file provided by the developer (from Dropox) and place it in the ~/.config/autostart folder.

Alternatively, you can download the deb file for WildGuppy 1.0 right now from Softpedia, but you will need to install any new versions the same way, If you install it with the PPA, any updates will be done automatically.