[LAPTOP] Setting up screen rotation and touch on a convertible laptop

[claydoh]

Lenovo Flex 15
I5-1035G1
Intel graphics
Wacom touchscreen


Any hints or tricks to getting things like rotation, onscreen keyboard etc in some sort of working state?

I can get 180 rotation via scripts or utilities but not 90 degrees and of course no easy to access keyboard.

Wayland supports 90 degrees but it does not rotate automatically for me at all.

Just looking for links and experiences from anyone setting up this sort of thing on recent hardware and plasma versions

Since the sensors do work and the utilities I've complied do rotate the screen in xorg I wonder what's missing for it to work natively?

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[oshunluvr]

I have a Lenovo Yoga 730. I haven't tried much of that stuff, but I'll be watching this thread with interest. Have you tried "onboard"? It looks like there are more options when using Wayland, which I'm also not doing yet.

[oshunluvr]

https://pointieststick.com/2020/06/

TLDR;

Auto-rotation for tablets, convertibles, and other hardware with rotation sensors: DONE
This was implemented for Plasma 5.18 and works on Wayland (getting it working on X11 is a lost cause, apparently). If it isn’t working for you on Wayland, it’s likely that you don’t have the iio-sensor-proxy package installed, or your hardware isn’t supported by the kernel yet.

[claydoh]

I had tried various things in the past, I could swear I had 90 deg rotation working. This was back with 18.04, though.

Onboard was at best clunky, but can work -manually invoking it i think.
Most all the rotation tools/scripts are xorg only. I do have auto rotate options in System Stetting when I boot to that, but non functional rotation

I'lll need to do a deep dive and try and rediscover and retrace my tracks.

[claydoh]

https://pointieststick.com/2020/06/

TLDR;

Auto-rotation for tablets, convertibles, and other hardware with rotation sensors: DONE
This was implemented for Plasma 5.18 and works on Wayland (getting it working on X11 is a lost cause, apparently). If it isn’t working for you on Wayland, it’s likely that you don’t have the iio-sensor-proxy package installed, or your hardware isn’t supported by the kernel yet.

Sorry for late reply, since I have been home, I got a new 'gaming' chair that is comfy af, gawd awful gaudy af (red was the least expensive color choice), and is NOT a rocker. I always break the weld in the seat base where the hydraulic piston inserts no matter how cheap or expensive the chair is. They all use the exact same design, and even setting the rocking tension thingy as tight as it will go, I still break that weld, usually within 6 months. This new chair has a broader heavier seat base, no rocking action, and reclines, plus a leg rest.

Anyhoo, I have been using my desktop PC now that I can sit comfortably for a reasonable length of time

The laptop already has iio-sensors installed, It may have had it already, or I installed it manually, cannot recall. As manual rotation, and the autorotate utils work without ootb, I am not sure it is a hardware support issue per se, unless it is a *buntu/neon specific one.

I have tried Wayland sessions, and though the setting for auto rotate is present there, it does not work. I did try the 5.8 kernel to see if there was any difference. Nope.

My only real issue with Wayland is I am often a very heavy Klipper user, and the usual copypasta methods I am used to do not seem to work, or I have not found pout how to configure it to work the way I like. ie selecting text with mouse copies/adds to klipper, middle mouse to paste.


Using one of the auto rotation utils I built did work well enough in 18.04, and I think I had 90% rotation with one, but can't recall. These are x11 only, however.
I think I may start with a fresh install and begin from scratch, research-wise. And dig through Lenovo's forums, there may be something there to get me started. haven't looked there in a long while.
Once I get rotation sorted, i can get touch dialed in (some minor config iirc) and tackle finding some sort of automatic Tablet Mode setup. I can just add an onscreen keyboard, and have an icon sitting in the systray wasting space most of the time but who wants that??

[jlittle]

... I always break the weld in the seat base ...

lol - in my first job, when I weighed not much more than half what I do now, I averaged one chair destroyed a year, usually breaking a weld.

[claydoh]

Ok, under Wayland, screen rotation DOES work, as long as I un-check the "Only when in tablet mode" option.
No onscreen qtvirtualkeyboard thingy comes up, though.
It is a start.






I also realize I am not folding the laptop when rotating it, and of course the sensors need this to work properly, so much of my issue may be pebkac

[claydoh]

This crusty python script does work for rotation in Xorg, but the screen blanks when doing so, and I have not yet gotten Onboard to open using it (for all of 5 minutes).
Then it stopped working, though likely because I killed the script but not any underlying process.
I am not a programmer, but the code is commented well enough, and since I know that rotation in X can work without the blanking, it may be just a simple command edit, so I may be able to edit steal something to make it work.

I imagine scripting an action to detect tablet mode and enabling an onscreen keyboard should not be hard to figure out or steal, for use in Wayland. And I have not looked through my history for touchscreen improvements for swiping and multi-touch actions.

Luckily I can investigate these things while lying down, when my foot and knee start bothering me.



Next.......

[claydoh]

Holy carp, I just noticed that Neon's Calamares set up a 21gb swap partition?!?!!
wth?

bug report filed.

[oshunluvr]

Holy carp, I just noticed that Neon's Calamares set up a 21gb swap partition?!?!!
wth?

bug report filed.

I just tested this on a VM using a 25GB hard drive and selected "Erase" (use the whole disk). It took 8.5GB of the 25GB disk but only had 2GB of RAM assigned. Looks like it's taking a third of the space for swap! WOW! I'm surprised no one caught this before. Maybe most aren't allowing the full disk to be used.

Seems odd to me because IIRC the *buntus these days are defaulting to a swap file instead of a partition.

[claydoh]

It is probably Calamares. No idea what options it supports.

I also didn't pay attention to any dialogs as I was making assumptions like it was Ubiquity.

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[claydoh]

This crusty python script does work for rotation in Xorg, but the screen blanks when doing so, and I have not yet gotten Onboard to open using it (for all of 5 minutes).

I figured that one out. The python script was using an acpi event id specific to the Thinkpad model(s) it was originally written for. I just needed to run the command acpi_listen to fond the ID when I fold the laptop to tablet mode, sub it in the script, and viola!
It does work, though with the screen blanking when I rotate it 90 degrees in Xorg. the acpi event id is a useful piece of the puzzle, I think.

[claydoh]

So, I have discovered that using wayland gets rid of the screen blanking out and back on while rotating. I also have not gotten the qtvirtualkeyboard to work at all --seems it has to be manually enabled in applications, and of course only works with Qt based stuff. Useless for me. And the alternative, Onboard, does not work in Wayland.

So my only option is to use Xorg, with its blinky screen rotation, and the fully functional python script using xrandr.

Or........check out how the Dark Side.... I mean Gnome shell, handles things.
Not very likely.


I have found no info about this xrandr blanking issue, which happens in Neon, and kubuntu 20.04/20.10, and in Manjaro, so any kernel 5.4 or higher. I did not have the blinky screen in Neon 18.04, can't recall the last kernel that had.

[claydoh]

Useless follow up post.

In a wayland session, the virtual keyboard does work, ootb (except for firefox, I think)
As long as I am running ........ugh.......grrrrrr ......argh........Gnome shell.\
Have not yet tested different DEs to see how well things work in Wayland with them.


I feel dirty, a little.




I also kinda miss Unity a little.