Linux – How to setup a dual-head display in portrait mode? (Arch)

arch linuxmonitorsmulti-monitorxorgxrandr

I have two monitors on my desk in portrait orientation.

One is plugged in with a DVI cable and the other with a VGA (I don't have two DVI cables available) into my Gigabyte Radeon 7750 HD graphics card.
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In Arch I installed xf86-video-ati from the official repository.
When I boot the machine both monitors are recognized and cloned in landscape position.

I generated xorg.conf with Xorg --configure and file is located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Inside of my xorg.conf at the end of all of the "ScreenX" sections I have added Option "RandRRotation" "True"

Now if I run xrandr --output DVI-1 --right-of VGA-0 the monitors will both be recognized as separate (not cloned displays anymore) and I am able to drag windows across the screens properly. However if I run xrandr --output DVI-1 --rotate right nothing happens, the same for VGA-0. I have also tried xrandr -o 1 this turns off all of the screens until I run xrandr -o 0 which only turns one display (VGA-0) back on.

How can I get the screens to rotate to portrait?

Best Answer

I was able to rotate my screens by installing the proprietary AMD Catalyst drivers for my graphics card and editing xorg.conf.

After installing the drivers I added the line Virtual 4096 4096 to my xorg.conf under all of the ScreenX sections. I was then able to use xrandr properly.

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