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I have a widescreen monitor that rotates. I'm trying to use it in 'landscape' mode (vertical). This is easy in the GUI.

How do I rotate my display when I am not running an X Server or when I am viewing a Virtual Console / Terminal.

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You can rotate your virtual framebuffers using fbcon. 0 through 3 to represent the various rotations:

  • 0 - Normal rotation
  • 1 - Rotate clockwise
  • 2 - Rotate upside down
  • 3 - Rotate counter-clockwise

These can be set from the command line by putting a value into the correct system file. Rotate the current framebuffer:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate

Rotate all virtual framebuffers:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate_all

If you want this to happen automatically when you start your system, you need to modify your boot loader configuration to give it the correct options. In /etc/default/grub add fbcon=rotate:1 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="fbcon=rotate:1"

(Don't forget to run sudo update-grub after changing this file.)

Sources: Rotate Screen, not running X windows, Rotate console on startup (Debian)

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  • 1
    Relies on CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE_ROTATION=y
    – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com
    May 5, 2018 at 10:38
  • Confirmed this work in virtualbox linux client too!!
    – John Siu
    Jul 18, 2019 at 16:34
  • Does not work in NVIDIA Jetson Nano supplied Ubuntu. /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate content will not change. rotate_all makes access denied even as root.
    – Tõnu Samuel
    Oct 3, 2019 at 4:27
  • It isn't a real file and it doesn't have contents. You can't read that "file". You can only write to it. Have you tried the command exactly with copy and paste?
    – Stephen Ostermiller
    Oct 3, 2019 at 10:35
  • Works for me in Debian 9 on an Intel IGP. What a joy to have a "portrait mode" full HD console :-)
    – frr
    Dec 11, 2019 at 8:39
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You can only rotate your display with some kind of X server. A virtual console as well as framebuffer has no support for rotating.

But maybe you can run some small X window manager like awesome and a terminal in full-screen mode. In this case you would get the rotation feature and it still feels like a console.

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    Ha! I used to rotate by frame buffer in Linux back when I had CRTs!
    – Caleb
    Jun 1, 2020 at 22:59

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