I have no idea why LCD screen went from being somewhat square to becoming widescreen. The trend started back in the 90’s when widescreen versions of DVD movies were the rage. So now we are stuck with screens that work pretty well with side by side windows. But I have an LCD that rotates and I wanted a tall view in a newspaper style.
I ran this on a Mint 13 Cinnamon install and used the xrandr application.
So start by identifying the Monitors on the system:
xrandr -q
You get output that looks like this:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1080 x 1920, maximum 8192 x 8192 VGA1 connected 1080x1920+0+0 left (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 475mm x 267mm 1920x1080 60.0*+ 1680x1050 60.0 1680x945 60.0 1400x1050 74.9 60.0
My screen is identified my the label VGA1. Yours may be different but it will appear right before the word ‘connected’.
Next I used xrandr again to turn the screen on its side.
I needed to tilt my screen left, but you can use left or right in the command.
xrandir --output VGA1 --rotate left
With that command, your screen will redraw and should now look something like this.
You can create a small script to run the commands and flip you screens on the fly as needed.
