[SGVLUG] rotating X display

[Claude Felizardo]

Has anyone played with rotating a display into portrait mode?

Here at work, I have an ATI Radeon 9500-X850 video card driving a pair
of Dell 1905FP LCD panels running in xinerama mode.  I'm trying to see
if I can get one of them rotated into portrait mode.  Works fine using
winXP but I'd like to see how it looks under Linux.  Using Mandriva
2007.1, when i to run KDesktop to rotate, i get an error saying I need
X 4.3 or greater and X Resize and Rotate extension 1.1 or greater.  I
have xorg-1.2.0 and xrandr2-1.2.0 with libxrandr2-1.2.1 installed.
When I try to run xrandr from the command line, Xlib says extension
"RANDR" is missing on display ":0.0" and that the RandR extension is
missing.

Looking at /etc/X11/XF86Config which points to xorg.conf, I don't see
anything like this so how do I do get this to load?  I tried adding
option "RandR" to the Extensions sections and a load "RandR" to the
module section, both caused warnings.  Oh, I also tried to add Option
"Rotate" "CW" to the device but the rotate option was not recognized.

oh, looking at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, I noticed the following warning:

(WW) RADEON(0): Direct Rendering Disabled -- Dual-head configuration
is not working with DRI at present.
Please use the radeon MergedFB option if you want Dual-head with DRI.

So I tried to add that to both of my devices and X failed with an
error trying to generate mode lists I think so I took it out.

Actually, would it make sense to run widescreen monitors in portrait
mode or would that just be too tall?  I'm thinking of replacing my
twin CRTs at home with either a single wide screen or two standard
panels, possibly running either one or both in portrait mode.

claude