Using Redshift with Mint on Debian

Redshift is a program that gives your computer screen a dimmer brightness, and indeed a more red hue, at night.

It fails silently on most non-Ubuntu Debian systems. Well, it seems like a silent fail or crash if you don't run the command in the terminal. If you do run the command gtk-redshift in the terminal, the output is perfectly comprehensible:

Initialization of gnome-clock failed.
Trying next provider...
Latitude and longitude must be set.

Seems this might be fixable by setting up gnome-clock or another provider, but it's also possible to hard-code lat/lon when starting Redshift. Getting to that in a moment.

My other question was how to get Redshift into the taskbar. We'll start with that. Open the menu, type redshift (after installing gtk-redshift through the software center), and right click the Redshift program and select "Add to panel". It's now down there somewhere a bit to the right of the Menu button.

Right click the Redshift icon in the Cinnamon taskbar (or, apparently, long thin panel) and choose "Edit". Change the Command line from gtk-redshift to gtk-redshift -l 42.311711:-71.114502 (or better, something closer to your own current latitude and longitude) and you're all set until you travel to another timezone.