Convertible: Auto-rotation of screen or at least rotation when pressing rotation button

[Till Kamppeter]

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Twist convertible ultrabook (Intel Core i7). The tablet mode (touchscreen-only operation, keyboard folded away) get continuously working better.

One important difference between a tablet and a laptop is that you can use it holding it in any orientation, with any arbitrary of the four edges to the bottom. Tablets, like my Nexus 7 (under both Android and Ubuntu Raring Desktop), auto-rotate the screen content appropriately. This way one can simply rotate the tablet when the other orientation is more suitable, like watching videos in landscape orientation and reading in portrait orientation.

It would be great to have this also in the tablet mode of a convertible (and switch back to standard landscape when returning to laptop mode). If there is no appropriate sensor, it should be at least possible to rotate the screen by pressing the rotation button (near the power button on the Thinkpad Twist).

This should not be a big deal, as on the Nexus 7 under Raring Desktop this is already implemented and there is also the Magick Rotation project:

https://launchpad.net/magick-rotation

AFAIK they simply rotate to portrait in tablet mode, but it is very important to have both portrait and landscape available in tablet mode. Also upside-down landscape is important, as dependent on the convertibles folding mechanism it could be more convenient to have the screen upside-down in tablet mode.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_twist

contains useful information about how to (manually) rotate the screen, the Wacom method for the touch screen orientation there always works nicely, but the xrandr method to rotate the desktop only works in standard X, not with XMir.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

The attached scripts rotates the screen by 90 degrees on each call. Works only with X, not with Mir.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Attached is an ACPI config file which should trigger a script when the rotation button of the Lenovo Thinkpad Twist is pressed, unfortunately, it does not work for me.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Script to be called by the ACPI file of the previous comment. Should rotate the screen by 90 degrees.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

The attached scripts need the touch screen to be Wacom-enabled. For this "|Atmel" needs to be added to the "MatchProduct" line in the "InputClass" section with Identifier "Wacom class" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-wacom.conf. See also the attached file.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

See also bug 1203215 about screen rotation not working with Mir.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.