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5

can't rearrange multiple rotated displays

rated 0 times [ 5] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 7669 / 2 Years ago, tue, august 30, 2022, 6:21:59

I'm trying to set up a computer with 3 HDTVs as one big screen, with each display being rotated 90 degrees to form a 3240x1920 desktop. I have them all hooked up and working, but when I try to rotate them to get the desired arrangement, suddenly I'm unable to drag the displays close to each other in the display manager. This forces there to be a gap between the 3 displays.

Has anyone else encountered this problem, and if so is there a workaround? And if not, is there a different program I can use to do this?

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sconhoney

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1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago fittecanap · Accepted Answer

Running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I was able to reproduce your problem using both unity-control-center (the default "System Settings" manager for Ubuntu) and mate-display-properties (which implements "Monitor Preferences" for the MATE desktop alternative). If you just rotate the displays, it won't let you simply drag them closer together -- seems like a bug, maybe this one.

I was able to work around the issue by just messing around a bit (after setting the desired orientation). Here's a sequence that seems to work (given my particular starting arrangement):

Drag display 3 to sit below and diagonal to display 1.

Drag display 2 to sit adjacent to display 1.

Drag display 3 to sit adjacent to display 2.

It's like some kind of sliding puzzle, where you can't go directly from the beginning to the end, but instead have to transition through intermediate "legal" states.

Below is a screenshot after the first step is completed.

enter image description here

EDIT: 3+ years later, I can no longer reproduce the fix that I posted here. There is clearly a bug in the MATE version of the tool.

ARandR is nice for multiple reasons:

It doesn't suffer from the rotation bug (it knows the correct geometries for each display).

It doesn't have the snapping feature, so you can put the displays where you want them.

It lets you save your layouts as a shell scripts -- giving you a quick way to restore prior states