How to rotate the screen with xrandr

[disciple]

For those of you with both a video card that supports screen rotation, and a monitor that you can turn on its side, it is very straightforward to rotate your screen (so it is in portrait rather than landscape orientation), using xrandr (x reflect and rotate from memory).

Open a terminal (Start, run ...), type "xrandr" (without quotes) and press enter, and it will tell you what your graphics card is capable of. Type "xrandr -help" (and enter), and it will tell you the commands to use - so if you want to rotate the screen 90 degrees to the right, use "xrandr -o right", or to the left "xrandr -o left". If you play around with reflecting it as well, you might get very confused, so remember that to get it back to normal you use "xrandr -o normal".

For those of us with graphics cards that don't support screen rotation, there is still hope - if you run puppy in QEMU (an emulator, ie running Puppy INSIDE OF windows or itself, or another linux - there is a link on www.puppyos.com), you will find that you can rotate the screen inside the emulator, even if you can't when running puppy natively - I haven't yet figured out how to resize the QEMU window so it is the right shape when doing this (it remains the shape of the puppy desktop before it was rotated), to see the whole puppy screen, but it must be possible. The only other issue with doing this is that your mouse will be working at right angles to the direction it should be, although in Windows this is easy to correct with the mouse orientation option in Microsoft Mouse or similar software.

[flopsymopsy]

Hey, thats cool!

I wanted to put an old puppy laptop in the Out house for music etc and fix it under the wall cupboard with a wireless keyb/mouse.............now I can.

Thanks for that...

[Brian C]

When I type "xrandr", I get "rotations possible- normal", and I cannot rotate my screen. Is this an issue of drivers, or related to the actual hardware? Is there a way to force my screen to rotate?

[disciple]

I believe it means your graphics card is not capable of rotation [unfortunately the one in the computer I run puppy in isn't ], although I imagine it might be possible that it wouldn't work with some of the flash graphics cards that need special drivers if you have them working somehow without the proper drivers.

Can rotation be forced? - This is what I have wanted to know ever since discovering xrandr. I don't see why it couldn't be in theory - as surely you just need your software to draw everything on its side - but I don't know if this is practical, or being attempted.
Quote from Wikipedia: "Rotation and reflection may be implemented by software and may result in slower performance if rotation and reflection are implemented in this fashion (as are all implementations as of October 2002)"

This does not really make sense to me, as clearly in Puppy's implementation they are done by hardware, not software, as they work on some computers and not others.
???

Aaah.. I see. They have written it not so that the software draws everything on its side, but so that it changes the order it sends information to the video card - reading pixels down the desktop instead of across or something, and the hardware then rotates the image.
http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/randr/randr/

I wish I could rotate my screen - but I have no AGP slot and no spare PCI slots, so I can't add a video card...