Although, there are currently no RPM, DEB or other common packages to install DisplayCAL directly under Linux, some distros supply recent DisplayCAL versions in their package management systems. Please search for them first.
Otherwise you can install DisplayCAL under Linux pretty easily.
In Linux, you can install DisplayCAL into an virtual environment through PyPI or build it from source. Currently we support Python 3.8 to Python 3.13.
To install DisplayCAL there are some prerequisites:
- Assorted C/C++ builder tools
- dbus
- glib 2.0 or glibc
- gtk-3
- libXxf86vm
- pkg-config
- python3-devel
Please install these from your package manager.
# Debian installs
apt-get install build-essential dbus libglib2.0-dev pkg-config libgtk-3-dev libxxf86vm-dev python3-dev python3-venv
# Fedora core installs
dnf install gcc glibc-devel dbus pkgconf gtk3-devel libXxf86vm-devel python3-devel python3-virtualenv
Note
Note, if your system's default python is outside the supported range you will need to install a supported version and its related devel package.
Installing through PyPI is straight forward. We highly suggest using a virtual environment and not installing it to the system python:
Create a virtual environment:
cd ~
python -m venv venv-displaycal
source venv-diplaycal/bin/activate
pip install displaycal
and now you can basically run displaycal
:
displaycal
If you close the current terminal and run a new one, you need to activate the virtual
environment before calling displaycal
:
source ~/venv-diplaycal/bin/activate
displaycal
To test the latest code you can build DisplayCAL from its source. To do that:
Pull the source:
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/eoyilmaz/displaycal-py3
cd ./displaycal-py3/
At this stage you may want to switch to the develop
branch to test some new features
or possibly fixed issues over the main
branch.
git checkout develop
Then you can build and install DisplayCAL using:
make venv build install
The build step assumes your system has a python3
binary available that is
within the correct range. If your system python3
is not supported and you
installed a new one, you can try passing it to the build command:
$ SYSTEM_PYTHON=python3.11 make venv build install
If this errors out for you, you can follow the Build From Source (Manual) section below.
Otherwise, this should install DisplayCAL. To run the UI:
make launch
If the makefile
workflow doesn't work for you for some reason, you can setup the
virtual environment manually. Ensure the python binary you're using is supported:
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements-dev.txt
python -m build
pip install dist/DisplayCAL-3.9.*.whl
This should install DisplayCAL. To run the UI:
displaycal