I have an old HP nw8440 laptop with a Radeon X1600 (FireGL) which has served me very well on Ubuntu up to 17.04. 17.10 does NOT like a "tall" monitor on the left.
Here's what's happening.
Internal display: 1900×1200
External Display: 1600×1200 (or 1200×1600 in portait mode)
Problem 1: Changing the video results in corruption of the screen, requiring reboot. I can live with that, it's just irritating.
Problem 2 (the real problem) I cannot put the portrait mode on the left side.
Problem 2a: The icons are limited to the height of the shortest monitor.
Problem 2b: The pointe will "shadow" on to the second screen as if the displays overlap.
Desired solution: Behaving system with the tall monitor on the left.
Screenshot explanations:
This arrangement works (tall monitor on right side)
Right side tall monitor, works great
When I move the monitor to the left side, the screen corrupts.
I can reboot to get rid of the corruption, but the icons are stuck at the wrong height.
Also, I will get a "shadow" or "echo" of the pointer on the left side monitor when it is in certain regions of the main screen. The echo is not rotated to the orientation of the monitor, and is not captured in the screenshot (only the main pointer is captured in the screenshot, not the echo). his is probably a third problem.
The same thing happens on the Unity windows manager or Xorg manager.
So, how might I report or characterize this bug or set of bugs?
Best Answer
I was able to solve this problem by making a fresh installation, upgrading to 64-bit 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" which properly supports multi-orientation multi-monitor on the HP nw8440 x1600 "FireGL" video.
Also, for some reason, using photos as background for lock screen and main screen prevented display corruption. When using the "Bionic Beaver" logo for lock and desktop screens, power save and lock screen returned to highly corrupted screens. I have no idea the root cause there, but using a photo background is a simple workaround against display corruption.
There may be some series of patches to make 17.10 32-bit work, but the move to 18.04 completely fixed it. There is some display corruption on the default wallpaper, but moving to a different wallpaper fixed that.
On an unrelated note, I couldn't enable the Wi-Fi in 18.04 until I went into BIOS and disabled WLAN, rebooted, re-enabled WLAN, rebooted, and enabled simultaneous LAN/WLAN in BIOS. Not sure which step solved the problem, but for the iwl3945 or iwlegacy driver, hey look more carefully at BIOS setting. Symptom was that the
phy0was "hard blocked" when looking atrfkill list all.