Screen randomly rotates on Ubuntu 17.10

Had the same issue. Seems like a bug. I disabled the screen rotation from task bar(top right) and it went to landscape mode. Just check if this works for you. Also, xrandr does not work on Wayland.

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchscreen orientation-lock true

Additionally, the below command ought to disable the orientation plugin completely.

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.orientation active false

Also, gnome provides an option to rotate the screen from Settings -> Devices -> Displays -> Orientation setting (search for displays in 'Activities').


One of the easiest way that I found to fix this problem on Ubuntu 17.10:

enter image description here


Solution: If you're stuck, here's a solution that worked on a 2012 HP Envy 14":

sudo apt-get remove iio-sensor-proxy (UbuntuForums Source)

Then log out and log back in.

Caveat: orientation lock icon is gone from the menu bar and you can't use the gyroscope (if it even exists in your device) to change orientation but that's not a problem since you don't want orientation changes anyway :). If you ever want to re-enable the feature, reverse the process:

sudo apt-get install iio-sensor-proxy

Observations: The HP Envy did not respond to the gsettings changes suggested here. It also did not respond to physically rotating the laptop or tilting the screen. Orientation settings were also missing from the settings application.

For some reason the auto-rotate code gets triggered after it's been asleep and it's impossible to get it to return to normal without CLI intervention.

The laptop does not recognize orientation changes or tilting the lid so I'm not sure why the orientation (rotation) automatically changed in the first place.