ddcbc-gtk – A GTK+ Tool To Control Brightness of DDC/CI Monitors

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Have a computer monitor supports DDC/CI protocol? There’s now a free and open-source graphical tool to control the brightness of your display.

Display Data Channel (DDC) / Command Interface (CI) is a type of communication between the computer and the monitor.

Most monitors today support DDC/CI, but not many people have heard of it, since most manufacturers do not develop proprietary software for the feature.

And ddcbc-gtk is a free open-source GTK tool for controlling brightness through the DDC/CI protocol. It includes support for controlling the brightness of multiple displays.

If you have computer monitors purchased in the past few years, DDC/CI should be supported. After enabled the feature via your monitor’s physical settings button, installing ddcbc-gtk will allow you to control the display brightness in Linux desktop.

How to Install ddcbc-gtk in Ubuntu 20.04 +, Linux Mint 20

1. First open terminal from your system application launcher. When it opens, run command to install some required libraries:

sudo apt install libgtk3-dev gcc

2. Ubuntu 20.04 users need to add the developer’s PPA for the ddcutil development library:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rockowitz/ddcutil

Then install the ddcutil libraries via command:

sudo apt install ddcutil libddcutil-dev

3. To ensure you have the permission to access to the i2c devices. Run following commands one by one:

  • Create i2c group if it does not exist: 
    sudo groupadd --system i2c
  • Add your user to the group: 
    sudo usermod YOUR_USER_NAME -aG i2c
  • Copy the udev rule to /etc: 
    sudo cp /usr/share/ddcutil/data/45-ddcutil-i2c.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
  • For testing, just give read write permission to the i2c devices: 
    sudo chmod a+rw /dev/i2c-*

4. Finally grab the source code, build, and run the software via commands:

  • Download the source coe via command: 
    git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ahshabbir/ddcbc-gtk.git

  • Then navigate to the source folder, run the script to build the application: 
    cd ddcbc-gtk && ./build.sh
  • Then you’re able to launch the tool from the directory via command: 
    ./ddcbc-gtk
  • To install the app shorcut so to open it from system application menu, run command: 
    sudo ./install.sh

Uninstall ddcbc-gtk:

The tool at the moment does not have an uninstall script. It can be however removed as easy as a few rm commands:

sudo rm /usr/bin/ddcbc-gtk
sudo rm /usr/share/applications/ddcbc-gtk.desktop
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