A few days ago my color calibration gadget ColorHug arrived in the mail, and I've had a few days to test it. As all my machines are running Debian Squeeze, where the calibration software is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid), I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD. This worked just fine. So far I have only done the quick calibration. It was slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for another day.
After calibration, I get a ICC color profile file that can be passed to programs understanding such tools. KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X. xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single monitor setups. But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct monitor. After searching a bit, I discovered that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted, and a simple
dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor. The result was a bit more pink than I expected. I guess I picked the wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good enough for now.