Yoga 500 - desktop autorotate, tablet mode

English Hardware
1

Hello all,
I’ve been trying for the past days OpenSuse Tumbleweed and until now seems quite fine.
I’m in a period when I try to partially switch from windows 10 to a good linux distro, and until now I am considering Manjaro and OpenSuse.
My PC is a Lenovo Yoga 500 with 8gb of Ram, touch screen and 512 GB ssd. I am using a lot this laptop in tent mode in windows 10 and I wish I would do the same in Linux. I also have a bluetooth keyboard.

I’m having issues with both distros when using the laptop in tent mode.
Is there a way to automatically rotate the desktop when changing from laptop mode to tent mode or tablet mode?
Thanks in advance for the answers.

2

Hi!

Automagically rotating screen is sadly not available on any distribution I know of… I think it is simply not implemented in the graphical server X11, and its successor (Wayland) has still a bit of a way to go to be truly functional (and even so, I’m not sure whether screen rotating is on anyone’s TODO list).

However, it is possible to do it by hand using the following script:
https://gist.github.com/mildmojo/48e9025070a2ba40795c

I have a yoga-like (Asus Vivobook Flip) laptop, and did some config to get some functionality working, I’d be happy to share some if you’d like. You can have a look at this page for touchscreen goodies:
https://www.linux.com/learn/how-configure-touchscreen-linux

A very ugly way to disable your keyboard when in “tablet” mode is to look up your keyboard ID in the “xinput” command output and then disable the keyboard with:

xinput float id_keyboard

where “id_keyboard” is, well, the ID of your keyboard. You can then re-enable the keyboard with:

xinput reattach id_keyboard id_virtualcorekeyboard

where id_virtualcorekeyboard is the ID of the line “Virtual core keyboard” in xinput. Not very user-friendly, I’m afraid… Also take care because having the keyboard disable might block you out of your session if you have a lock-screen enabled (the keyboard will be reactivated on restart tough).

Hope this helps!

3

@flyos

Thanks for the pointer to the script.

I have a Yoga Pro. Tablet mode is not a problem as the keyboard locks in that mode – it seems to be operated by the lid magnet. However I have missed tent mode, which seems the best mode for heat dissipation, and is ideal for watching lectures and other streaming media.

4

You mean you have keyboard lock in tablet mode on OpenSuse? I’m jealous! Is there anything specific you did to get that?

5

No, I have never known it not to work. This is a Yoga 3 Pro. At the moment it is running Tumbleweed but had 13.2 installed when new in December 2014.

When it is folded back into tablet mode the keyboard (but not the touchpad) is disabled and the keyboard backlight is switched off.

6

Well, lucky you! :wink:

7

I tried Ubuntu Gnome 16.04.1 live usb on a Yoga 3 Pro and screen rotation worked quite well!

8

Very interesting; thank you. When (if) I get the time I will try to work out how it’s done, in the hope of transferring this to Plasma 5.