Comment 48 for bug 868904

I've recently started using f.lux and settled on this program for when I'm using Linux. I ran into this and investigated the issue a bit. It appears that the problem is hostip.info simply isn't reliable. Geoclue via hostip was working fine until my ability to reach the server ended. I assume the problem lies with hostip server and when it cannot even establish a connection geoclueinstantly fails rather than ping it on some schedule.

For those wanting to use this program reliably without having to depend on either geoclue OR gnome-clock as a location provider, I'd recommend manual configuration. You can do this using the legacy manual lat/lon command. Find your current location using another service such as http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html. Some people above seemed confused by the format for redshift's manual command, it follows standard +/- notation where +latitude is north and - latitude is south and + longitude is east while -longitude is west.

Command example:
redshift -t 6500:3400 -l 43.63:-79.33 &

The above command starts redshift with coordinates for Toronto area of Canada, I have also provided new defaults for daytime/night color values (same values as f.lux) with -t. The & makes the process execute in the background.

Likely redshift should find a more reliable internet mechanism than hostip.info for the future though it isn't really the programs fault.

As a final note, if you are like me and don't want to have to execute that on each reboot. I'd advise putting that in a tiny script and having it execute on startup via whatever startup manager/process your flavor of Ubuntu uses.