Rotate display

[Sébastien Marchand]

Hi everyone,

I'm Sébastien, an intern at Google Montréal. (I still prefer to use my Gmail account because I want to get involved even after the end of my internship).

I just got a brand new Chromebox, I love it but I think that something's missing... I can't rotate the display :(

I know that it didn't make so much sense to rotate the display on a Chromebook, but for a Chromebox I think it's a little bit different... In my case I want to use it as a small computer for my kitchen that'll allow me to listen to my music and follow a recipe while I'm cooking... It's just an example of a situation where the ability of rotating the display will be useful...

So I was wondering, is it a feature that should be added ? Did you already discussed about this ? I'm a little busy currently (I've 3 weeks for finishing my address sanitiser for Chrome on Windows !) but I'll be really happy to help on this if you're interested !

Sébastien

[Daniel Erat]

http://crbug.com/119268

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[Sébastien Marchand]

Thanks, apparently I haven't searched enough ! (I've only looked on the Chromium OS wiki....).

On Monday, July 23, 2012 3:57:26 PM UTC-4, Dan Erat wrote:

http://crbug.com/119268

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 9:54 PM, Sébastien Marchand  wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm Sébastien, an intern at Google Montréal. (I still prefer to use my Gmail
> account because I want to get involved even after the end of my internship).
> I just got a brand new Chromebox, I love it but I think that something's
> missing... I can't rotate the display :(
> I know that it didn't make so much sense to rotate the display on a
> Chromebook, but for a Chromebox I think it's a little bit different... In my
> case I want to use it as a small computer for my kitchen that'll allow me to
> listen to my music and follow a recipe while I'm cooking... It's just an
> example of a situation where the ability of rotating the display will be
> useful...
>
> So I was wondering, is it a feature that should be added ? Did you already
> discussed about this ? I'm a little busy currently (I've 3 weeks for
> finishing my address sanitiser for Chrome on Windows !) but I'll be really
> happy to help on this if you're interested !
>
> Sébastien
>
> --

[孙裕栋]

I got the same question, but I cannot get access to the link  http://crbug.com/119268, It shows Error 403.

Can you tell me how to do that on Chrome OS :)

在 2012年7月23日星期一UTC-5下午3时15分52秒，Sébastien Marchand写道：

[Daniel Erat]

Sorry, access to this bug was restricted since it now contains
discussion about not-yet-released hardware.

Here is a summary: Support for screen rotation is currently targeted
at the 24 release of Chrome OS.

> --
> Chromium OS Developers mailing list: chromiu...@chromium.org

[oshima]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 7:26 AM, Daniel Erat <de...@chromium.org> wrote:

Sorry, access to this bug was restricted since it now contains
discussion about not-yet-released hardware.

Here is a summary: Support for screen rotation is currently targeted
at the 24 release of Chrome OS.

Additional note: While the bug is marked as m24, whether or not it will be available in 24

depends on priorities of other tasks for 23 and 24. My current guess is that it will be post 24.

- oshima

[Andrew Leahy]

Hi, I am able to rotate the display on my Samsung Chromebox in 'dev' mode using "xrandr -o left" or "xrandr -o right" from shell.

Basically do this: Ctrl-Alt-T -> "shell" -> "sudo -s" -> "xrandr -o right"

HOWEVER when rotated the screen resolution isn't adjusted and the half the display is now off the monitor!
eg. rotating 1920x1080 on HDMI1 gives me a rotated display with 1080x1080 usable pixels at the top of the monitor, the rest of the desktop is off the side of the monitor!

I can scale the display mode to fill the monitor with something like "xrandr -s 1.778x0.5625" but that just creates a stupidly distorted image.

I've tried roughly setting up new modes (1080x1920/60 and 1080x1920/30) but so far I end up with a blank screen.

I'm using the DVI output (HDMI1) on the Chromebox.

 Version 25.0.1364.26 dev

 Platform 3428.49.0 (Official Build) dev-channel stumpy

 Firmware Google_Stumpy.2.102.0

Any ideas?

Cheers, Andrew

eResearch | UWS

[Trev]

Did you try the --output --scale option to xrandr?

I understand the good logic of what you're doing however it's not clear to me that you can just do this from the X server and expect everything else to go along for the ride.  For example, people can not just display a remote xterm on the X server (hence "desktop" or "GUI") in Chrome OS because the window manager Aura is customized.  So that tells me that you may not be able to just issue commands to the X server and have the windows you're looking at obey in the way that normal X windows might.

See for example:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-os-discuss/6EKs3JnjsKI/DaJ7ACvMGIMJ

And see what happens when you hit ctrl-shift-alt and the refresh key (F3) simultaneously.  I'm not sure this proves anything because the layers of the X server and window manager animation here aren't necessarily indicative of what would happen with a "real" screen orientation rotation versus the effect you see, but I do wonder at least a bit.

Would be interesting to hear more about this from people who know.... Anyone?

[Andrew Leahy]

Hi Trev, yes I meant --scale in my post not -s.

eg after rotating, if I do "xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 1.7778x0.5625" it fills the 1080x1920 screen, but everything is stretched and distorted as all heck. Not usable.

On standard Linux distro's just using "xrandr -o left" is all that is needed to rotate from landscape to portrait. The X window managers reconfigure themselves for different arrangement of screen real estate.

Pressing Ctrl-Shift-Alt-F3, spins the Chrome browser window within the top half of the rotated monitor screen.

The window "footer" (Chrome, Gmail, G+, etc icons) doesn't move and stays at halfway up the screen.

Now that you've mention this "Aura UI"  I suspect that even though the screen has "rotated", the window manager/desktop itself is not "rotation aware". So still displays 1920x1080 desktop, which means that a chunk of it is off the rotated screen.

note: I'm running ChromeOS not Chromium, and I'm very new to this platform.

Andrew
eResearch | UWS

--

[Trev]

The "barrel roll" trick was just to illustrate the Aura wrappings, I didn't mean that it might fix something.  Just trying to illustrate what I think you are concluding as well.

But would be good to hear from a Aura developer about this.  Anyone?

[Sean Paul]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 12:38 AM, Trev <trr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The "barrel roll" trick was just to illustrate the Aura wrappings, I didn't
> mean that it might fix something. Just trying to illustrate what I think
> you are concluding as well.
>
> But would be good to hear from a Aura developer about this. Anyone?
>

You already have :) Oshima responded earlier in the thread, he's the
one implementing this.

http://crbug.com/119268 tracks the feature request, you can
star/follow it there.

Sean

[James Cook]

I work on Aura.  Monitor rotation didn't make it into M25 and is unlikely to make it into M26 either.  But we know you need it and it's on the list of things to do real-soon-now.

James

[Trev]

Thanks James.

I think we were more simply curious as to why xrandr doesn't just work.  Is there a quick and dirty technical explanation- one-two sentence 30,000' view?

Apparently, trying to get xterm windows to display on Chrome OS from a remote device is a lost cause because of Aura's differences from a standard X window manager, and so I have assumed Aura is also the reason xrandr doesn't just work.

Perhaps a closer look at the Aura dev doc would answer these questions, but if there's a quick explanation, I know I'd be interested.

Trever

[Stéphane Marchesin]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 12:29 PM, Trev <trr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks James.

I think we were more simply curious as to why xrandr doesn't just work.  Is there a quick and dirty technical explanation- one-two sentence 30,000' view?

The reason is that Chrome doesn't know or care about the rotation state, and so can't adjust its behavior  That would include input, graphics...

 

Apparently, trying to get xterm windows to display on Chrome OS from a remote device is a lost cause because of Aura's differences from a standard X window manager, and so I have assumed Aura is also the reason xrandr doesn't just work.

People are working on adding the capability to run X windows in Aura. It is a bit of work, because Aura took over the window management job, and now needs to also do window compositing to redirect X windows. But it's doable. CCing reveman@ who's working on this and will know the status.

Stéphane

[oshima]

In short, we're not using X as an window system. There is no WM. A browser window doesn't

have a X window associated with it.

Instead, we create one X window for each display, which hosts our own compositor, and entire ChromeOS

desktop lives inside this compositor(s). You can say Aura framework uses X just as a graphics driver,

and that's why xrandr doesn't work.

We still uses xrandr to configure fb/crtc, but are not going to use xranr to rotate screen due to

the driver issue that @marcheu mentioned in crbug.com/119268.

I hope this helps.

- oshima

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 12:29 PM, Trev <trr...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Trev]

Yes- that helps.  Thank you.

Any info on the status of efforts to redirect x windows so they can display also appreciated.  I know quite a few UNIX developers who want to get onto Chrome OS "desktops" but they need to be able to display back X windows to their Chrome OS "terminals".  Without that, they are on Macs.

[Dana Jansens]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 4:29 PM, Trev <trr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes- that helps.  Thank you.

Any info on the status of efforts to redirect x windows so they can display also appreciated.  I know quite a few UNIX developers who want to get onto Chrome OS "desktops" but they need to be able to display back X windows to their Chrome OS "terminals".  Without that, they are on Macs.

There's no plan to support this feature in official "ChromeOS" builds. You will need a custom ChromiumOS build or a ChromeOS in developer mode to enable this. We have a functioning prototype. The current work for landing in Chromium is pending my review.

[Trev]

Um, sorry but strictly speaking the phrase "land in Chromium" is confusing me a bit...  this is a Chrome/ium *OS* specific functionality is it not?  I seem to recall that Aura wasn't just about an X windows implementation, but cross platform considerations as well...  but I would not expect the Chrome browser on windoze to be able to display an X window because I assume it doesn't use an X server at all.

Dev mode I understand.  The idea though is for them to be on maintained machines (i.e. Google does it for us with the usual updates).  Thus Chrome OS.  And hopefully they don't have to RW the root filesystem?

Okay so this thread is mutating a little bit and I'm not sure this is still the correct list for it.  But... thanks in advance!

[Mike Frysinger]

Aura has been repurposed. Ash is the CrOS-specific WM (although you
can test it fine under any Linux system) while Aura is the generic
graphics layer.

there was a thread on the Chromium dev list about this, and there's also this:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura/aura-and-shell-dependencies

also, all of the CrOS-specific parts of Chromium live in the Chromium
project (including Ash).
-mike

[Andrew Leahy]

Hi, thanks for the background.

If it helps with motivation, my application for rotated displays is for deploying Google Liquid Galaxy using Chrome and ChromeOS rather than the current Linux or Windows builds. See http://liquidgalaxy.endpoint.com/

We have Chrome-based multi-machine panoramic Google apps & content ready-to-go, can't really say much.
Using all of HTML5, WebGL, WebSockets and some WebRTC.

Can deploy using Chrome browser on top of standard Linux/Windows. But...

if we can run the whole show with ChromeOS display nodes and Android controllers, it will be a 100% Google ecosystem :)

Cheers, Andrew

eResearch | UWS

[Trev]

Thanks all.